Webdev: January 2005 Archives
Referrer spam on this site is increasing daily. Until now I use a two-step method to block them --- even though I don't publish my referrers. First of all, I maintain a list of used domain names. I check my referrers every day, and add newly found domains to the list. If a visitor uses one of these domains as referrer, the request is automatically blocked, and the IP address of the visitor is automagically put on a second list, making sure that future visits will be blocked as well. IP addresses stay on the list for one month, to make sure the size of the list does not get out of hand.
I noticed that the domains on my list are all mentioned in the MT-Blacklist. So those referrer spammers are also comment spammers. MT-Blacklist is updated automatically from the clearinghouse, so needs less maintenance. It would be nice to be able to combine the two methods right?
Today I found derefspam.pl, a script to use the MT-Blacklist to remove referrer spam from your server log files. At first thought I wanted to install it, but then I realized that all this script does is throw away information, so it won't pollute your statistics. Since I want to be able to see what really happened on my server, I prefer not to throw away this information. After all, these requests have consumed some bandwidth... A thought was to implement a script for each request, but I am sure that this will slow down my site too much, since database requests take time... For the moment I stick with my two lists, and hope that spamming will decrease soon.
My good ol' club Jong Nederland has a new site, based on the Mambo Open Source ---MOS--- CMS. The old site was based on home-brew PHP, and desperately needed a change.
It looks like they have the basic functionality up and running in MOS, but in my opinion they need to work a little bit more on the design. I am sure that they will fix it, since it already looks better than this morning. Of course the horrible "Designed for Internet Explorer" disclaimer has to go!!!
Further tips to make the site better:
- Knowing the amount of events Jong Nederland has, it would be better to present an event list instead of a calendar;
- Mambo has a nice option to create friendly URL's, which only needs some changes to the
.htaccessfile; - The section pages should be more descriptive and at least contain links to the sub-sections to make browsing easier. I had to look twice before I noticed the extra options in the menu;
- Jong Nederland has a huge collection of drawings and logo's, but these are not used at all in the articles. I want Kleppie and Molly Mol!!!
As a regular contributor to the old guestbook, I need to browse my old JN stuff to find my membership number, so I can access the new forum.
