Spammers have been sprinkling my access logs with referrer spam. I'm not in the habit of checking my webstats obsessively, but lately there are a couple of broken bots that have been generating 404's a lot and sending me emails about it. (My 404 error page is a script that emails me when there's an error so that I can fix broken links and other problems.)
This is Annoying, so I've put an end to it with ModRewrite. I'm using a combination of these tactics and these to hopefully redirect spammers back to their own sites. I'm hoping it does the trick.
Update: Okay, never mind. I posted this entry, reloaded my index page to check that it looked okay and that I hadn't forgotten an end-tag somewhere, and found that my new rewrite rules borked Apache. So I've commented it all out and am going to revisit the issue when it's not slightly-too-late on a work night.
Dorothea Salo says:
I just posted a longish, rambling how-to on anti-referrer-spam tactics. Hope it's useful.
Laurabelle says:
Dorothea, I do find your post very useful. I had found Mr. Costello's page but not fully grokked what his rule was supposed to do. That led to my modifying and breaking it. :-)
Now it still produces errors (but not the as before), so I've commented it out until I can figure out what's going on. However, your other rules are useful, especially since they don't use ModRewrite. Thanks.