Changed site behavior

[jiml8]

Over the last few days, I have noticed that the "bad" traffic to my site has vanished.

I have been dealing for a long time with extensive referrer spam, which corrupted my logs to the point of making them almost useless, and I have responded by building a BIIIIIIIG .htaccess file, filtering lots of keywords/phrases to block spammers for drugs, porn, gambling, and so forth. The consequence is that I see lots of Error 403s in the logs.

Over the last couple of days, this has all stopped. Now, I am certain that the bad guys haven't all just gone away, so I presume that bluehost did something.

I am happy to see it, but what did you do?

[MikesTooLz]

I too have created an .htaccess file to block them. Im not getting as many any more but their are still a few.

to avoid the error logs what i did was just creat a cgi counter and forward the bad referrers to the counter. This way every time i get one the counter goes up. I even added the counter to the site so the members can see it.


xbox360lowdown.com if you want to check it out (may be down right now, im having issues with bluehost)

**EDIT**
I spoke to soon, I just looked at it and its blocked over 2,000 in the bast couple days.
My site was down yesterday for going over the 20% process limit because of it.

[jiml8]

Well now.

The referrer spam has resumed. I guess bluehost didn't do anything to stop it.

This leads to a question, though: Why did it stop pretty much completely for several days?

This suggests that maybe all the referrer spam on the net is coming from one source, which is spoofing IPs rather blatantly. That one source went down for awhile, then came back up.

Now, isn't that interesting.