Following up on Tim Bray’s comments on a recent flood of referer spam, I just left this comment at Gary’s site:
What puzzles me is how colocation and broadband providers never seem to monitor their networks well enough to see this: if individual sites can see these storms, I imagine are even easier to see on the sending side.
I suppose the only recourse is to ensure no reputable business uses shoddy hosting providers: perhaps we need to start publishing a score card that tracks what provider networks are responsible for the most outbound crap.
Would “shoddyhosts.org” be worth doing? The allegations would need to be documented — you wouldn’t want someone’s gripes over a billing error getting added into the mix — but that seems to happen most of the time anyway.
It’s not like hosting and broadband providers are unaware of the problem. Why should their customers have to spend their time concocting new solutions when the people who run the networks could stop a lot of this at the source?