I’m getting slammed by referrer spam. I don’t care about who links to my site. Is there a way to completely remove the referrer page so that it doesn’t even exist?

Right now it exists in www.mysite.com/index.php/weblog/referrers/. I want it so that when someone tries to access it it simply isn’t there.

Right now spammers accessing it are sucking up bandwidth like crazy.

I don’t want to do the htaccess thing, i just want to make the “referrers” page go away.

Delete the referrers template. Either that, or change it to a different name. (Changing the template group name and the template name will keep it behind bars, unless you publicly link to it. It doesn’t show you tons of detail, but it can give you an “at-a-glance” look at who’s visiting your site.)

EE doesn’t handle non-existing templates the way you know it from static HTML pages. As far as I remember, removing the template would by default only cause the index template to be called. You can set up a custom 404-template ... but it won’t help against referrer spammers. The only solution I’d see is using the blacklist module.

Why don’t you want to block them through the blacklist and the optional .htaccess blocking option? That would eliminate the problem at the root for known spammers - of course it will not help against unknown referrers and spam IPs.

-Markus

If you don’t want the referrer page to display at all, and you are on a server you can run a .htaccess file, place this on a single line:

Redirect 404 /index.php/weblog/referrers

Anyone accessing that URL on your site is going to get a 404 error, even if the template still exists at that location within EE.  Its simple and will block anyone from access that referrer page.

Wiki’d.

I’m still running v 1.2.1 so I don’t have the blacklist .htaccess thing going on.

I did do the .htaccess redirect thing and that’s working. Will this cut down on the amount of bandwidth being sucked up?

Thanks for the info.

Yes it should because each 404 File not Found error page is around 300 bytes, and if their scripts are even partially intelligent they will realize they are requesting a page that does not exist and give up after awhile. (or at least you can hope they will).

I think I might have a similar problem:
A site is linking to my site but added on /?referrer=css-gallery.co.uk to the url.
Since I have a .htaccess rewrite this produces a 404 page. How do I need to change my .htaccess file so that the users trying to access /?referrer=css-gallery.co.uk will see the homepage. My current .htaccess file looks as follows:

Of course I am more than willing to change this if I need to… The problem is I do not know how…
Thanks.

Oe that is a good one, i wanna know the answer too.. So anybody?

I tried

While this keeps the functionality of removing the /index?/ (Expression Engine bit) it doesn’t redirect my referrals… What am I doing wrong?

Also can someone explain how the first bit actually works. (The bit that gets rid of the index.php in the url. What does the RewriteCond do?