Jfoucher.com - A la voile sur la toile

As you've probably seen on this blog if you've been here in the last few days, I have been subject to a case of referrer spam, made very useful by my use of the Referrer plugin.

I managed to delete most of these references to web sites of dubious content by going through the StatTraq table and eliminating all references to the particular IP address using these methods. That solved the immediate problem, but it could come back tomorrow and do the same thing. So I banned that IP address from submitting it's referrers to StatTraq. This was fairly easy to do: just adding the following line at around line 38 in the StatTraq plugin:

 if ($ipAddress=='217.159.201.131') $referrer='';

That should do the trick for this address. To be sure it doesn't happen anymore, I also banned referrers containing some words, giving this kind of rule :

  if ($ipAddress=='217.159.201.131' || ereg("Let|me|spare|you|these",$referrer)) $referrer='';

Another method I used is modify the Post Referrers plugin to use a Google redirection to link to the referers, so that spammers can't take advantage of my pagerank, which might hopefully deter them. Or am I too optimistic?

I hope that should do the trick. Please leave a comment if you notice that kind of stuff again, just in case I didn't pay enough attention...