Denying non-local referrers

Tue, 1 Feb 2005

A couple of weeks ago I was trying and not succeeding in blocking external referrers from my CGI directory. I got my sysadmin to enable .htaccess and Mod_Rewrite for that document root, after which I declared success, but actually I never actually tested my rules. (Oops.) I was trying not to use Mod_Rewrite (since it's fairly [...]

Google and comment spam

Tue, 1 Feb 2005

This weekend I noticed that Googlebot had started indexing the URLs of my newly renamed comment script, even though it wasn't actually crawling the pages. Since comment and trackback spammers don't need the content of the page, just the URL, this was not enough for me. I wrote to Google to find out what could [...]