I’ve been writing for a while on how referrer spam is making the blog visitor stats semi-useless. Spammers, hoping that bloggers will list the top several sites which send visitors to them (with links to the referrers included), barrage blogs with massive amounts of fake referrals. That is, they “look at” your blog, and in so doing, fool your site into believing that the “visit” originated from a link on their site leading to yours. The “visit” will be recorded in your logs and their site gets credit as having sent the “visitor” your way via a link on their page, even though the link doesn’t really exist. The more they barrage your site, the higher they will rise in your rankings.

Now, I don’t post such rankings. Most bloggers don’t. And my stats files are in protected directories which others can’t access. So it is for most bloggers. But that doesn’t stop the spammers. Of my top 100 referrers in AwStats, only two are legitimate. The vast majority of the spam referrals are about poker, and probably most if not all are generated by the “Texas Holdem” cockroach that so many bemoan.

Now the good people who write code are finally starting to react–Tony at juju.org has created a script that accesses the MT-Blacklist file to actively clean out log files. Ron at Groovy Mother has created a hack for AwStats that will filter out referral spam from its logs.

So you’d think I’d be a happy camper, right? Except that so far, the hacks introduced are at the same level of many hacks: designed for people who know a lot more about computers than I do, including use of the command line interface. The instructions are greek to me, no for-beginners kind of stuff that says step-by-step what to do. They assume I know exactly where to put the code and how to integrate it, stuff like that. Heck, I have no idea of where AwStats resides on my site or if I can even access it for a hack. Movable Type and MT-Blacklist are the next step up, scripted code but with documentation so you get taken by the hand through the process–well enough, anyway, so that it only takes a limited amount of time scratching your head to figure out how to get it to work. I will, of course, ask on the pages of the scripters if they’ll provide such instructions, but in the past I haven’t had too much luck when I do that.

Still, it’s a great first step to getting the spamming bastards’ maelstrom down to a dull roar.