AngryPets.com

ReverseDOS DogFood Report

About a month ago I posted that I was putting ReverseDOS to work on my site to stop Referrer Spam.

Results:
First Half of May: 1347+ Hits from Referrer Spammers
First Half of June: 36 Hits from Referrer Spammers (35 of those were 'caught' and sent an HTTP 403 - Access Denied, and therefore didn't even show up in my analytics with legit referrers).

That's a HELL of an improvement. (i.e. it's roughly a 99.75% reduction in Referrer Spam)

So, it would appear that Referrer Spammers DO pay attention to Response Headers. And because I kept sending them an HTTP 403 - Access Denied each time they tried to access my site with a 'blocked' referrer, they got the message and stopped comming.

Pretty cool if you ask me.

So, what's next? I'm working on creating a library where people can post their 'filter' patterns. The patterns/filters I've got set up work fine for me. They'd work fine for other people too, but there are bound to be other types of referrer spam out there. That, and I'd like to set up a bunch of filters for comment spam -- so a library where people can post (and then copy/paste) will be beneficial.

I should have that up and running soon....

posted on Tuesday, June 14, 2005 9:28 PM