Near as I can tell, pretty well every somewhat-visible website in the world is seeing its logfiles fill up with with bogus page fetches there only as a vehicle for a spammish “referer” field; whether or not the site posts referrer data. This high-volume flood is a fairly recent phenomenon, and what makes it weird is that the vast majority of the bogus referrer sites are off the air due to some terms-of-service violation. It would appear that a sleazebag somewhere launched a really ambitious assault on the whole world — using, I can only assume, a few zillion zombified drone machines — only to be found out and have their hosting yanked while their mindless slaves continue to spew vacuous venom into logfiles everywhere. Damn, the Internet is a weird place.
This has been commented on in this space before, but what I find most annoying is that it means my own logging is useless for all but the most raw of statistics — bandwidth used — and I track that with mrtg anyway. So I use the Google AdSense reports to see how many actual page views they log. Yesterday, I recorded more that 7,000 page views — I drop requests for css files, images, and javascript on the floor — yesterday, while Google only recorded 500 actual requests.
And how surprised would you be to learn that all the bogus referer spammers report themselves as MSIE/Windows?
Rebecca may not be seeing this as much as I am, but these jerks make it hard to know how much good could be done if we can’t reliably count our audience.
remembering rebecca :: january 2005:
You’ll never see a pledge drive on this site, and those of you who have visited my wishlist know that I do this because I love it, not because I hope for some material gain. But if every individual who visits this site gave just $10, we would have raised over $65,000 in just the first two weeks of January. So now I am asking for your financial support. Please, if you can spare just $5 or $10, donate right now to help rebuild these lives.
Now playing: Northern Boy by Randy Newman & others from the album “Randy Newman’s Faust” | Get it
<update> it seems Tim updated his earlier post with some user-submitted research and a call to the home phone of the perpetrator of this global irritation.