I’ve got good news, and I’ve got great news! The good news is for spammers. The great news is for you.
The good news is that in 3 simple steps you too could win a trip to Disneyland:
- Visit one of those sites that lists this blog as a dofollow blog (BTW – it doesn’t dofollow anymore)
- Click on a link to my blog.
- Have a great time in Disneyland!
The great news is that you can send those spammers to Disneyland too! Just take a look at the code in disney.txt and copy it into your wp-config.php (Put it right at the top of the file!) or into an auto_prepend file.
The $bad_referrers array is a simple list of offending sites that send you the most spammers. Add them in and when the spammer comes visiting they’ll be whisked off to Disneyland for a magical tour of the castle. (Hopefully they’ll meet an ogre who’ll take a fancy to them and lock them in the tower or something!)
I use my Comment Referrers WordPress plugin to tell me where comment authors come from but sometimes if they’ve browsed around my site (and the referrer is gone then), I search my logs for their IP address.
Yes, the above could be done with .htaccess mod_rewrite rules but this is more portable and I redirect to a Pretty Link shortcut so I can easily count the hits. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to exclude the hit to the shortcut and it would redirect continuously.
Update! I added rewrite rules to send the spammers off. I’m sure these rules can be improved so leave a comment if you have any tips.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*theseomizer.com.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*seomizeme.com.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*revolutioners.com.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*rishabhsood.net.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*011831068587400451950.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*backlinkmagic.com.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_domain_analyzer.jsp.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1011238.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*courtneytuttle.com/blogs-that-follow/.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1006727.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1003675.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*rasimcoskun.com.* [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*smartpagerank.com.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://disney.com/ [R,L]
And in other news, Stephen Cronin created the comment warning plugin to warn visitors who come from predefined urls like the dofollow lists above. Nice!
AWESOME! Thank you thank you thank you! 🙂
I’m usually 4th or 5th result down on these sites, and as such get a stupid amount of spam.
Emailed, stumbled, tweeted (or will be), blogged and I’m not sure what else to get the word out 🙂
Haha, you’re welcome. Hope Disney appreciates the extra traffic!
lozer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hi
I would like to come to disneyland with my wife & 8 years old son. Please arrange.
Thanks
Lalith
Sa-weeeet! Great fun.
How does this interact with WP-Super-Cache? Won’t they get the super-cached page (if it exists)?
You’re right, they probably will get the supercached page alright. I’m not too worried about that though. Maybe I should add the simplistic rewrite rules to trap those referrers.
I think something like this would work, if it was before the cache rewrite rules:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} site1\.example\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} site2\.example\.com [NC,OR]
…
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} siteN\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule http://example.com/ [F]
Doesn’t the last line have to be:
RewriteRule .* http://disney.com/ [R,L]I had that bit working, but the RewriteCond to exclude my shortlink failed each time
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REQUEST} !^/shortcodeurl$before the other conditions should have worked, shouldn’t it? (I think that was it, working from memory of yesterday)
Whoops! You’re right. Locally I was playing with just giving a ‘Forbidden’ response (RewriteRule .* – [F]), and messed up reformatting it here.
You’re such a git! Here I was thinking I was in with a chance to get a hug from Mickey Mouse this summer! 😉
Hi Donncha,
Thanks for this post.
I think I’ve decided I’m going to write a plugin similar to this, but also checking whether people have arrived via a search for dofollow, KeywordLuv, CommentLuv and related terms (I get lots of these).
Instead of redirecting them, I’m going to display a modal ‘popup’ warning them that using keywords in the name and in fact anything short of a fantastic comment will see them marked as spam. I guess I’m too nice! Maybe I’ll add redirection as an option. I’ll log instances of such visits, so perhaps I’ll redirect after a couple of repeat offences from the same IP address.
I notice that the code in your disney.txt file is Copyright. Mind if I use some of it in a GPL licensed plugin (with attribution of course)?
Anyway, thanks for this post, it’s a great inspiration.
Woo, sounds good! Use my code as much as you like. It’s just a simple foreach() loop after all. I’ll add a GPL notice to it too just to be clear.
I usually edit those comments, changing the name to John and removing the email/url. 🙂
Thanks Donncha,
I’m pretty busy, so it may take a week – I’ll let you know when it’s done.
Hi Donncha,
I know you’re unlikely to use it as you have a solution that works, but just to let you know, I’ve finally released the plugin – it’s called Comment Warning.
I suspect it doesn’t work with WP Super Cache though, as it uses the the_content filter to add the message for those visitors that have a suspect referer. I’m planning to test this sometime soon and get it working somehow.
In the 4 days I’ve had it running on my blog, the warning message has been shown 77 times! Less spammy comments as a result.
hi im hannah and im 7 years old i dont understand the part that says visit one of those sites that has your blog or something.
Thats pretty cool.
I really don’t understand, is this a script so spammers will be redirected to disney.com?
Kevin – yes, that’s right!
LOL Interesting post. I really thought I was going to join some sort of contest to win a trip to Disneyland. Then I read it and couldn’t stop laughing. I might just try that. hahaha 🙂
So, what happens when a search engine spider follows a link from one of the pages on your blacklist?
It seems to me that the “law of unintended consequences” is liable to bite you on this one somehow.
Stu – it’s only a temporary redirect and it’s only one link, from a spammy site that Google possibly knows already. Also, some of these referrers are from forms that the search engines won’t be able to index.
Also, search engine bots don’t leave referrer data so they won’t be redirected anyway.
Ah, it’s the little things like this that makes life worth living. Thanks Donncha!
But Busch Gardens is loike so much better…
Hi
On my blog I use the Bad Behavior Plugin by Michael Hampton. It handles 99.9% of all the Spam Bots. If you look at the footer on my site it usually prevents 400 to 600 access attempts.
Hi there
I’m not a programmer. I’m an educator. I try to teach kids to be discerning about their clicks i.e. don’t be taking the dumb tests that populate all the gaming sites cuz it’s a sure-fire way to get spammed. So, I wonder if you could take a moment to put into simple language that a grade 6 student would understand the problem/and your solution. It strikes me there’s a lovely story here but I don’t speak code so I’m a tad lost in the vernacular.
cheers
i would love to go to Disneyland with my mum,dad and brother please I’ve always wanted to go there im 10 years old
I REALLY WANT TO GO TO DISNEY LAND AND ME MY MUM,DAD,SISTER,BROTHER,AND LIL BRO USALLY GO TO DISNEYLAND EVERY YEAR ,BUT THIS YEAR WE CAN’T THATS WHY I WANT TO WIN A TRIP TO DISNEYLAND AND ESPECIALLY SENSE THEY HAVE A CHRISTMAS SPECIAL