About aStatSpam and referer spam in general

[How referer spam works?]

Many people will wonder what referer spam is, or what this script does. Here are some explanations :

Referer spam is a new spam technique used from webmasters around the world and the only legimate right now. Here is the definition of referer spam in the wiki pedia.

How referer spam works?

The spammer uses a program which will visit your website just like a browser, and it will send a referer header. The referer header will have the spammer's site url, so it will be recorded to your statistics log files. This way the spammer benefits twice.

1) The spam site will be seen by the webmaster, who will probably visit it,

2) But it will be also be seen by the search engine crawlers, and raise the link popularity of it.

The main problem that this technique causes, is the bandwidth loss and the server overhead. For instance, when I first got a spammer's attack there were made about 1500 requests to my site in less than an hour, and the server's cpus were working on 98%. This was a major problem for me because during this hour the real visitors of the site couldn't get any pages.

Now let me tell you what astatspam does:

It connects to a spam database (which I mantain) that lists sites that are referer spammers.

Then it creates an .htaccess file on your site (or edits the allready existed one) and adds some directives that commands the web server to redirect the referer spam traffic somewhere else. This way the spammer will not steal your bandwidth, and also it will not be recorded by your stats. The only dissadvantage of this script is that it wont work with servers other than Apache. Sorry for that guys, if there is any expert here to make an alternative version for other servers and other languages than php is welcome

The script's url is http://www.thetopsites.net/referer_spam/

Enjoy using it, and please let me know any problems you have experienced with it, so I can make it better.

Also have in mind that this is an open source script. That means that it is distributed for free but we could use any help to make it better. If you can help in any way please send me a pm.

You should also know that this script has no waranty and you are using it at your own risk. I haven't paid by anyone to create it, actually I just thought to share with other people the solution that I found to this major problem of webmasters.

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