No, Ruby! That's what I think could be the problem. Not many people have this language installed on their servers. I guess someone should port ReferrerCop to C or something. Know any Unix C programmers?

"updates to the default blacklist (which occur pretty frequently these days)"

He SAYS he is starting a hosting company because he wants good hosting...but really he is dangling us all as bait in the net of Inter, waiting for the referrer-spammers to nibble at our toesies so he can harvest them for his growing blacklist....

A lot of Linux distributions have Ruby installed by default these days, and most FreeBSD users use portupgrade (a Ruby tool) to manage their installed ports. And for the folks who don't have Ruby installed, it's not like it's hard or anything. There's even a super easy executable installer for Windows. I really don't think that's the problem.

The problem is that at some point a year or two ago, when referrer spam started getting bad, someone who thought they knew what they were doing popularized the idea of using .htaccess files and mod_rewrite to create huge sets of rules to deny access to referrer spammers. So now that's what everyone does, even though it's pretty much ineffective and will bring Apache to its knees. I think if more webmasters just knew ReferrerCop existed, they'd realize it's a much better solution (and far more flexible).

I use it and love it! However, I have had to add several sites to the blacklist. I don't think a single site listed in the Wonko blacklist has hit me yet, but others have.

The -U command line option is a big start but it would be really great to have a places where users can submit spam URLs they see for a quick (one day) turnaround.

I've been thinking the same thing. I'm considering creating a website to provide real-time statistics and spam URL submission capabilities (a little like SpamCop, but for referrer spam).

I just started using Referrer Cop to filter my awstats. Great Program! (Fortunately I have Ruby already installed on my server.)

How do we report new spam referrers to you so you can include them in your blacklist? Is that something you could build into the script?

If there is one thing that my CS Education at PSU has taught me, it is Unix C programming. With that said, I love Ruby and I don't see any reason that it should be hard to install on servers.

"misusing mod_rewrite" is one way of looking at it. It's not a quick solution, to have a blacklist of that type, by a long shot. But it is nice and easy to maintain, at the moment.

ReferrerCop looks great, however doesn't solve my biggest problem. For me the biggest issue is the sheer volume of requests and bandwidth the referrer spammers are responsible for. For me the referrer spam was slowing my site down so much and taking up so much bandwidth, that some extra processing of each request and an inefficient solution was, and remains, the best for me.

It would be nice if there was a way to manage this problem without the need for these kinds of workarounds and fixes. Oh well!

Keep up the good work - the tool looks great!

You do have a good point there. I've been trying to come up with ways ReferrerCop could actually block referrer spammers rather than just filtering them out.

One method would be to use mod_rewrite's RewriteMap to filter all requests through ReferrerCop and block the ones that are spammers. Unfortunately, I've experimented with this and either the documentation for RewriteMap is just plain wrong, or RewriteMap has some serious bugs that keep it from working the way it's supposed to.

I'll keep working on it, though. I'd rather not have my bandwidth wasted either.