If you have a website that’s being owned (pwnd/0wn3d) by referrer and/or comment spam, you have to check these two utilities out.

[1] Referrer Karma. Referrer Karma catches referrer spam before it happens. See the site for all the rules and whatnot. This thing catches hundreds to thousands of referrer spams (mostly from porn, casino, and e-commerce sites) that try to hit ThinkBlog and slaps them in the face with a 403 (Forbidden) error message. This is useful for admins, even if you don’t have a referrer system on your site’s frontend, because the logs aren’t full of thousands of nonsense referrals.

Unfortunately, I cleared the tables again the other day so if you get a 403 error and you legitimately clicked-through, leave a comment here and I’ll whitelist the site (usually, though, I’ll catch it within a day or so).

[2] Spam Karma 2. Spam Karma 2 is a plugin for WordPress that has caught about a hundred or so spam comments on ThinkBlog.org in the past two days. I’m very excited that I’m not getting an inbox full of poker nonsense anymore.

(Also, the fact that these two very useful items were coded by the same guy is remarkable.)

If you have a website that’s being owned (pwnd/0wn3d) by referrer and/or comment spam, you have to check these two utilities out.

[3] Referrer Karma. Referrer Karma catches referrer spam before it happens. See the site for all the rules and whatnot. This thing catches hundreds to thousands of referrer spams (mostly from porn, casino, and e-commerce sites) that try to hit ThinkBlog and slaps them in the face with a 403 (Forbidden) error message. This is useful for admins, even if you don’t have a referrer system on your site’s frontend, because the logs aren’t full of thousands of nonsense referrals.

Unfortunately, I cleared the tables again the other day so if you get a 403 error and you legitimately clicked-through, leave a comment here and I’ll whitelist the site (usually, though, I’ll catch it within a day or so).

[4] Spam Karma 2. Spam Karma 2 is a plugin for WordPress that has caught about a hundred or so spam comments on ThinkBlog.org in the past two days. I’m very excited that I’m not getting an inbox full of poker nonsense anymore.

(Also, the fact that these two very useful items were coded by the same guy is remarkable.)