While Comment and Trackback spam are under tight control, the referral spammers have broken through the AwStats referral patch; despite quickly adding any new spammers to the list, blacklisted domains continue to break and flow through. As always, the spammers get zero benefit–the spam is visible to me and no one else, and no links at all go back to them. But now it seems like they’re just doing it for fun–as is marked by the fact that the referral spam almost invariably accesses blog entries I have made on spam. So we’ve gone from aggressive advertising to pure vandalism, not that any spammers out there are anything but vandals.

Next step: wait for someone to create a better site statistics filter. Probably the folks at AwStats should rework the software so as to include this natively, allowing for manual control of filtering–but more important, retroactive filtering, a la MT-Blacklist. The current patches only stop spams as they come in, and they miss a certain amount even if they are working. It seems like such an obvious thing–referral spam is making AwStats useless, so one would only imagine that the people who make AwStats would do something about it.