Flutterby links a Wired article about spam in blog referral logs. I ranted about this over a month ago. At the time, I snooped and found at least one of the culprits, though (since referrals are money to these people) I still refuse to link to them. And since then, the problem has gotten worse. I've pretty much stopped reading my referrer logs.
Another medium of useful information ruined by the scourge of advertising.
Comments
>filter referral logs to ignore clients which don't also download images
Yeah, but if you go that far, you might as well set it up to connect to each alleged referrer, and confirm that there's a link to you on each one.
I always wonder: if there was a way you could hit a button repeatedly, and every time you did it, it would give you ten cents and deliver a small, painful electric shock to somebody within ten miles of you, how many people would do it for a living. Probably more and more as time went on.
I'm not sure how I feel about society protecting us from unsolicited actions that hurt us for somebody else's benefit -- there's only so much of that you can really prevent. It would be nice if that were the point of the whole edifice, though.
ignore clients which don't also download images.
My experimental music web site has no images on the main pages, not even spacer gifs. (Except for those <link rel="icon" ...> things, which many browsers ignore.)
Comments are now closed on this site. Too much comment spam. Sigh.
A commenter on Slashdot suggested an interesting way around the problem: filter referral logs to ignore clients which don't also download images. Obviously you'll miss Lynx users and people with image display turned off, but hopefully you also miss web crawling spammers.