Referral Spamming

[irn-bru]

I checked my referral stats on vbstats today and found that I had over 100 hits from at least 30 hard core porn sites.

I deleted them all which took me a while and I couldnt be bothered putting them
in the vbstats referal block list as it would have just taken to damm long.

Then later on today I now have found another 20 hits from other porn sites.

I have had a few bad reffers in the past that I have blocked in vbstats and by htaccess but I dont think I can keep up with this kind of spam.

It has left me with no other option but to uninstall vbstats or at least block the link que and referers page.

Now this might be all very good if you like links to hardcore porn on your web site but for myself and my members its just not our bag.

I mean WTF is this all about ?

I have done a search on google to find out more about this so called Referral Spamming and it seems that bloggers are the most at risk as they show there last 10 reffers on the index page.

From the above information there seems to be a fix for some bloggers by downloading a plugin, but for the rest of us with vbulletin vbstats or any other php stats script I dint find much out and untill then I shall be keeping my refferal page offline.

[Dean C]

It may have been the case that your members were in fact browsing hardcore pornography It's easy enough to remedy anyway. Just add a clause so that it selects URLs which do not contain the substr: 'hardcorepornurl'.

Alternatively you could just use apache handlers to block all referrers from the site