Over the last few days the referral spam tide has ebbed and flowed: for about a week, everything that came in was pointing to doobu.com, then today, there was a definite change in tactic as 15 new poker related domains (see the existing story on referral spammers for the updated table of details) were added to the ever growing list.
I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth creating an RSS feed that would update as I discover each new referral spammer. This might then provide a viral trust network so that queries could be rejected based on the referrer – as soon as a spammer is positively identified, any requests featuring it would just get Forbidden. I already have a db table in my StatTraq MySQL server, so knocking up an RSS generator should be a doddle. Raise your hand with a comment anyone who’d like to encourage me to develop it, or I’ll just keep commenting idly.
You do know that Matthew Sullivan or ex-Netscape association has written something to help with this called SORBS. It blocks based on open MTAs. Not sure if it’s what you’re after but…
http://www.nl.sorbs.net/
What you want is (as Andy says) a DNS RBL for referrers, very much like the Spam URI Realtime Block List which gets used to spot spam URLs in emails passing through SpamAssassin.
I want to know how to stop the referrer spam. It annoys the heck out of me.
A note to the poster of message #3. Sorry, you’ve been anonymised because of your professional affiliation, but thanks for your comment, it’s appreciated.