Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop.

May 16, 2007 10:53 AM

Porn sites are spamming my web stats. Make it stop.

For a few months now, my referral log has been flooded by mildly amusing, but mostly annoying, porn site URLs. These sites are throwing off my data entirely, filling the log with anywhere from 1 to 200 hits each. Almost all of them are over-the-top porn URLs. I want it to stop.

I know what the phenomenon is, and I’ve read all the other AskMe threads about it. I’m not interested in diagnostics, I want to know the cure. I run WordPress, and I’m currently running the Bad Behaviour plug-in, and have been for two months, but the problem has remained. Yes, I run Google Analytics as an alternative, but I’d like to solve the problem within this stats program (Webalizer Version 2.01), too.

Clear, step-by-step instructions would be most helpful, but any suggestions would be much appreciated. Oh, and you can click here to view my referral log from May.

posted by Milkman Dan to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Most analyzers have a way to block URL patterns.
posted by rhizome at 11:46 AM on May 16, 2007

Block the URL patterns with .htaccess. Instructions here or use Google if those are step-by-step enough for you. It won't be a perfect solution as they invent new URLs all the time, but you should be able to get 80% blocked with minimal effort. More help here from the Wordpress support site.
posted by COD at 11:54 AM on May 16, 2007

Are you blocking your public stats from search engines with robots.txt or a robots META tag? Referrer log link spammers not only point their bogus REFERER headers at you, they often also have bots which crawl for common stats page keywords and check back on those stats pages to see if their efforts are working. By deindexing your public referral log pages from search engines, you make yourself less of a viable target for link spam campaigns.

Here's a post I made a couple of years ago on how I handled my referrer spam flood issues. Email me if you want a copy of my .htaccess blacklist, which I estimate has successfully blocked about 80% of the hijacked proxies and zombies which propagate the junk.
posted by brownpau at 12:12 PM on May 16, 2007