The voice of reason:

why would anyone spend time on this? Spam is an irritation, sure, but the goal of this application is to blog, not to be a tool for spiting spammers. There are SO many other things that people could spand time on...

Uhh, head in sand? I've got a blog up for several reasons, none of which are to provide a free billboard for some porn merchant to post his warez. Not to mention the fact that several of the spammers I've had trouble with are including nice things like BHO droppers, so people visiting my site are risking compromise due to these people.

It's an itch that I'm scratching, you see...

my head isnt in the sand by any means -- I am merely saying that are already methods of dealing with spam built in b2evo, and several addtional methods scattered all over these forums.

you posted a feature request, and you are entitled to do so obviously. I am equally entitled to say that I think it would be a waste of time and would ultimately cause more headaches than it would solve.

If you want to STOP spam thats great, then work on stopping it before it makes it into your server logs. Not after. I can tell you from experience thats the only way you will succeed over time. imo.

There are tools available on the web that allow you to find all domains owned by a particular person, all domains hosted on a box, etc..

whoo, if you hadn't deleted my post in HowTo (utterly lame, rude and poor choice on your part, btw), you'd have seen that I listed all the steps I am taking0 to deal with this problem. What it comes back to is that there are relatively few serial spammers out there(right now I'm getting serial-spammed by some utter POS who owns the umax site and am working against him on several fronts), and their model is such that their spams land through redirects on the same site. I'd much rather have antispam look for a redirect and match the redirect target against the list. Yes, it would be more expensive, and yes, that's something that probably shouldn't be on by default. Again, it would be useful, and would do wonders to keep these creeps off our evo blogs.

Looking at some of the other suggestions for spam here, I see a lot of stuff that involves dinking around with .htaccess files and the like. While none of that is too intimidating for me, why take that route when antispam is already built into the software?

Gloin,

The tricky part about this is that the antispam checker doesn't actually follow the link - it just compares the HTTP_REFERER with the items in the database, and if it matches, it's spam, and if it don't, it gets logged.

There is a reverse-referrer checker that uses file_get_contents to look up and see if a referrer actually links to you, but it slows down your page really bad, and doesn't work 100% of the time. What you're talking about would be even worse than using file_get_contents - it would have to hit the site, then look for any Location headers in the response. Failing that, it would have to parse the site's html and look for either a meta refresh tag, or a javascript that changes the window.location object.

All of this happening each time a page is loaded? That would make your site really super-slow, and would be quite tricky.

If someone knows of a way to do this in a realistic way, then I'd love to know about it.

Trust me, it annoys me, too.

Whoo,
I don't think he's talking about spiting spammers. But you know when you get 5 different domains, and you check all 5, and then all redirect to the same site, that there has to be a better way. He's talking about a way to identify all of those sites as the same spammer, and then just ban the final destination, and have them all be banned somehow. It's a cool idea, just impossible to implement, as far as I can see.

There are several other threads talking about fighting referer spam:
[url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4506]autoscript for .htaccess to block b2e blacklist domains[/url]
[url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=2985]Anti-spam update recheck prompter[/url]
[url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4512]Antispam Bandwidth[/url]
[url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4506]autoscript for .htaccess to block b2e blacklist domains[/url]
[url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4483]So here's my 10 minute anti-spam-referer hack[/url]
[url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4520]ReferThis automatic htaccess generator[/url]

I've used a .htaccess-based solution for three days right now. It blocked about 160 referer spammers for that period.

isaac: thanks for the reply. I suppose I'll just have to cope with it for the time being.

On that note, has anyone noticed a HUGE uptick in referral spam activity lately? It's really pissing me off - to the point that I'm actively looking for US-registered domains with an eye toward getting all litigious up on them (despite my casual writing style, I do know how to write a motion and order :> )

gloin wrote:

On that note, has anyone noticed a HUGE uptick in referral spam activity lately?

about 40% of my refferals are spammers... takes a hell of a long time to blacklist them all

5gb of bandwith in less then 2 weeks time, apparently to what I just dicovered to be spam. one sunday they even managed a wholly 750MB of the crap. unfortunately unlike you guys, I know next to nothing about updating my php and working with all these hacks, so I'm somewhat of a standstill.