Monthly Archives: June 2014

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Are You A Blogger?

I’m not sure if I like the term “blogger.”  It has a social media Johnny-come-lately feel that I can’t stand.  I’m being a jerk, I know, I just can’t help it.  Whenever people find something fun within the overly commercial depths of teh interwebz, a timer of sorts is set in motion.  Soon enough the profit glands get to salivating and every opportunist this side of the Pecos is leading the charge over to your favorite sites.

noahsarcade

“It’s hip, it’s fresh, it’s Noah’s Arcade. Word.”

Faster than you can say “Facebook used to be fun” your beloved blogs, message boards, and stupid image sharers are now littered with advertisements, your relatives, and that thick sewage of the internet, spam.

Which is a rough segue into the point of this post: If you are a blogger, and you hate getting spam traffic on your page, there is hope.  You may not know that you can do this, but you can actually block specific IPs and domains from accessing your site.  If you’re tired of trackback comments in broken English and false page hit stats, then you may have just stood up with a fist in the air and proclaimed, “The hell you say!”

The hell I do say.  And it’s pretty easy to do.  All it requires is finding the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website and appending this code to the end:

SetEnvIfNoCase Via evil-spam-proxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-domain.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer evil-spam-keyword spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Via pinappleproxy spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer semalt.com spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer poker spammer=yes

Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=spammer

This isn’t meant to be a tutorial on how .htaccess files and the apache web server works. There is more than enough documentation out there for those who are interested. But for the casual blogger, just know that this code essentially specifies a domain you know to be sending you spammers, and then blocks them from accessing your pages while allowing everyone else entry.  For example, look at the line containing the word “semalt.com”.  Semalt does nothing but send bullshit spammers to your site.  That’s their business and business is good.  This line basically tells the web server that there is a domain called semalt.com which is referring users to this site, and that semalt.com should be labeled as a spammer.  At the last line of the file, we see that the web server is being instructed to deny access to any domain we’ve identified as a spammer.  Easy peasy.

Now that you’ve reclaimed your land from the dreaded spammers, you have cause to celebrate.  Treat yo’self.

You can't look at this frown.  I dare you to try.

You can’t look at this and frown. I dare you to try.

 

Happy blogging.