Goodbye Bigpond-customers
Effective immediately, customers of the Australian ISP Bigpond are denied access to this site. The reason is simple: Some stupid spamming aussie f*ckhead is hammering my site, attempting large-scale referer-log-spamming - which won’t work at all, since there are no public referer logs visible on this site.
IIRC, I did send a mail with a complaint when this abuse started back in July, without ever receiving a response.
So far in October, this idiot has hit my site over 12000(!) times, and I’m tired of it. If denying Bigpond-customers doesn’t make the problem go away, I’ll solve the problem permanently by removing this blog permanently from the surface of the Internet.
And this is a message to all those of you who actually do publish your referer logs: Please stop this insanely stupid practice: You’re actively contributing to the problem, giving spammers free marketing, and you’re no less of an idiot than them, and you’re, in my not so humble opinion, no better than the spammers themselves.
Update: Since I wrote this entry, the number of “403 Access Denied” served has changed from ~12000 to 30499. Aaaarrrrgggghhhh.
Comments
Comment from Nick Chalko on 2003-10-03 19:35
I never thought of it like that.
My referer logs never seemed to work anyways.
What about the comments links?
Can we prevent them from becoming filled with spam?
Comment from Duncan Riley on 2003-10-07 10:23
I can sympathise with the problem, but two points:
1. Bigpond is Australia’s largest ISP and market leader, you are effectively cutting of a potential audience pushing 1 million. (No, I am not a Bigpond customer, cant stand them and wont defend them, but the spammers are winning if you are blocking access to all)
2. Referral logs: I always saw these as a way of rewarding those who link to my blog by providing an automated link back to them on The Blog Herald however I recently had a link to Discount Life Insurance appear in it (which I have blogged about). I do not think that I am an idiot, naive maybe, but I think you are being too harsh on myself, and others, who are only trying to assist fellow bloggers
Comment from Arve on 2003-10-07 17:26
Duncan:
1. I know I am blocking Australias largest ISP, and I know I am blocking access to almost a million people. I would block AOL and it’s potential 35 million users if the problem originated there, and AOL was unwilling, or unable to fix the problem. This is a matter of bandwith costs: I can now serve a 403 error that just transmits a few bytes, instead of a +20KB document, which is a huge difference when I have had 36000 requests in a week.
2. Referer logs are a potentially useful tool for discovery of links from both internal and external sites. I actively use referals to discover quality sites linking to me, and if I find quality content linking to me, I read through the site, and sometimes I do link back.
An automated system that just creates links back to a site whenever it is found in the referer log achieves two things, which spammers will want: It will drive traffic to their site, and it might even help the site achieve a higher search engine rank, since Google and it’s likes uses links to determine what is quality content or not.
An automatic public referal list is perhaps even a better tool than e-mail spam, because one single computer on an ADSL line can hammer thousands of websites thousands of times every day, if desired, and achieve a high ranking on most of these lists.
So, I use harsh language (re: Idiot) for a reason: I, and other website owners eventually end up paying for other peoples ignorance.
Nick: So far, spam in the comment links have been a limited problem, since these tools usually have to be crafted to one specific blog system. I am however a bit worried about what will happen when the Atom API is popularized, and one can use the same software for posting comments to any blogging system. In the end, I believe I might end up moderating my comments before they are published, instead of retromoderating, like I’m doing now.
This discussion has been closed. No further comments may be added.