Well… first we had the scrapers… now we have the spammers… Since about 4:30pm my blog has seen an inordinate amount of traffic originating from all over the place… the one common thing… all of it is apparently referrals from a site that pushes software for getting your links around and about the web. I’m not going to give them the recognition they are after by putting the domain on the front page, so if you want to know more, read on…

The site listed as the referrer is www dot submitter software dot com… they succeeded in posting 5 comments, all punting a piece of software to help drive traffic to your site by abusing shareware software sites and their PAD files… whatever they are. The software in question is actually produced by a another company, so I can only assume that submitter software is an affiliate looking to increase their earnings… maybe I should drop the software house a mail I thought… let them know about the unscrupulous tactics employed by people pushing their products… then when I looked at the products produced by this company I figured they’d probably applaud.

Of course, there could be a perfectly legitimate reason why my site was being spammed… maybe the site owner purchased advertising services from the company they make a mention of on their site and they had no clue what they would do to increase their traffic. So… Rebekah Hudson of 177 Captain HM Shreve Blvd, Shreveport, Louisiana (with the email address kphudson@comcast.net), I’d love to hear how you are involved with submitter software dot com (other than being the registrant).

So, how to stop this kind of crap if your site gets blitzed by this sorted of traffic… well, it’s actually quite simple if you can modify the .htaccess files and your server has mod_rewrite enabled. Google the search string +”block” +”referrer” +”apache” and you’ll get quite a lot of pages that provide details of how to block visitors based on referrers.