Spamming for votes
Jan 5, 2004 | Q

Presidential candidates who have recently spammed my referrer logs (no links, for obvious reasons):

  • Dick Gephardt
  • Carol Moseley Braun

Presidential candidates who have recently spammed other people’s referrer logs:

I seriously can’t figure out what the motivation is, since generally, the only people who’ll notice are the people who are most likely to be pissed off by the spam. Of course, it’s not like we’re talking about viable candidates… smiley

Comments and TrackBacks

I got Al Sharpton spam. Maybe it’s a GOP plot to get the weblogger vote.

:)

• Posted by: James Spahr on Jan 5, 2004, 9:50 PM

I’ve gotten it from most every one of the Democratic hopefuls within the last week … and also several from Starprose and the PH video.

Oi. Referral spam.

• Posted by: Geof on Jan 7, 2004, 3:45 PM

Okay, so a couple weeks back I closed down the referer logs, thinking that I was somehow getting spammed. I was, but not in the way that I thought. I was reading Q Daily News when I saw that he’d pointed to Doc Searls’s bit about having ref…

• Pinged by The Indiana Jones School of Management on Jan 7, 2004, 3:50 PM

From what I have heard from Cameron Barret, some unscrupulous individuals are using some sort of spoofing software to achieve this effect. Every campaign has been victimized. He has assured that the Clark campaign is in no way behind this.

• Posted by: Jeremy on Jan 9, 2004, 4:44 AM

My own referrer logs show that there’s just a lot of this coming these days. Of course, what’s funny is when they link to my /refer/ directory … I know then that they’re 99% likely to be spamming me.

I think the way you combat this, maybe, is to have your referral scripts go back and check for actual links to your site in any incoming references. If people are simply spamming your referral logs, well, the script could remove them from the script-based logs. [I realize that Apache logs shouldn’t get touched.]

• Posted by: Geof on Jan 13, 2004, 12:20 PM

Add democrats.org, John Kerry and Dennis Kucinich to the list on my behalf. :)

• Posted by: dennis on Jan 17, 2004, 11:33 AM
Please note that comments automatically close after 60 days; the comment spammers love to use the older, rarely-viewed pages to work their magic. If comments are closed and you want to let me know something, feel free to use the contact page!