Over the past week, my humble blog here has been pelted with referral spam. Someone or some organization is just hitting every single post on my blog with spam on poker, texas-holdem, etc. About every 3 hours they restart at the first post and go through every single post again and again.
This morning I read a post from Chris Frazier talking about his success with ReverseDOS from AngryPets. ReverseDOS basically filters incoming requests to your blog so that any obvious referral spam gets an access-denied response. Here is the description on how it works from AngryPets:
“ReverseDOS filters incoming requests to your site. When it sees requested, or posted, content that you don't like, it denies access to the requesting client. This way clients that don't play by the rules can't see the same content that your grandma can -- visitors to your site either play nice, or they are denied access (a Reverse Denial Of Service, or ReverseDOS).”
I installed ReverseDOS this morning to work with .Text, my current ASP.NET Blog Engine, in about 15 minutes. The steps are simple and very well explained on the AngryPets website:
- Copy the assembly to the blog's bin directory.
- Make 3 easy changes to your blog engine's web.config file to register the assembly and set-up filters.
Because I installed ReverseDOS while a referral spam attack was being done to my blog, I witnessed the beauty of this tool immediately. The referral spam was immediately squashed by ReverseDOS, and I have been referral spam free for over an hour!
If referral spam is totally ticking you off, I recommend visiting AngryPets' website and checking out the free ReverseDOS tool to help with comment and referral spam. My hats off to AngryPets. Thanks.