Tech 03 Feb 2005 02:50 pm
Oh, and talking about spammers…
Yesterday I forgot to mention exactly the type of spam that irritated me enough to post about it: referrer spam. One look at today’s stats reminded me of it, though. In short, the list of referrers is now entirely useless as a means to find out where users came from. It might as well not exist. In yesterday’s access log, which refers to Feb. 1st, virtually all of the top referrers are spammers, coming from domains like freakycheats.com (51 entries) and psxtreme.com (52), both with a large list of subdomains. And, of course, both come from all over the world, so it’s not possible to prevent it by blocking IP addresses (they are certainly using bot nets).
And they generate traffic! Some 5% of the total traffic of my web site is now caused by blog spammers (including comment, trackback and referrer), and I believe this will grow. I don’t think many people are already seeing traffic as a problem caused by blog spam, but mark my words: it will be a problem. It may be a larger traffic generator than podcasts in the not-too-distant future. And this will not be pretty.
