Last week I noticed refer spam from BlogSurfer.us. I had written up a vitriolic post in knee jerk response. Reconsidered it, and took the post down. Reconsidered it yet again, and put it back up. Perhaps it will just die off like AlphaInventions did. But after the end of the first week, it had only grown worse. Not finding a means to opt-out, I joined the forums to formally request my blog be taken out of BlogSurfer’s rotation.
That snapshot was taken this morning. The post itself was made December 2nd. “rcondron” is the creator and maintainer of BlogSurfer.us. He answered quite promptly. Because this is a one-man show, I thought it would take a couple of days for him to have time to edit his block list. And sure enough, things did start to die down.
Guess what.
It’s ramping back up again.
There really isn’t much I can do, because I’m using Blogger as my platform. To really stop this nonsense, I’ll need to edit the .htaccess file[1], which isn’t going to happen because this blog is hosted on Google’s servers.
His service is not causing me any financial harm, nor any DDOS issues. His service does preclude me from ever placing ads on my blogs, as it is considered “artificial views” or “robot generated views”. Not planning to place ads on my blogs, ever, so that is more personal annoyance than anything else.
For me to continue getting referrer spam from BlogSurfer means someone is seeing my address included in a BlogSurfer referrer link. Gomen nasai, I didn’t do it.
[1] What to add to your .htaccess file to knock off this nonsense: (may line wrap on your screen, it’s four lines)
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer"^http://(.+\.)?alphainventions\.com/"BadReferrer
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://(.+\.)?blogsurfer\.us/" BadReferrer
order deny,allow
deny from env=BadReferrer
Update: February 15, 2011:
Off again, on again. After two weeks of silence, the “service” is back in play. Still a shitty piggybacking service to abuse blog owners. Those of you with access to .htaccess, employ the block with impunity. Those of us on shared blogging platforms will just have to continue to clean the logs as best as we can. I wonder if Blogsurfer can be used to DDOS a site? Just submit your target to the rotation and walk away.