Referrer Spam is the New Amway
Ever since I found out about Amway and other network marketing schemes many years ago, I’ve always considered them the lowest form of commerce in the world. I mean, you’re not creating a damned thing and you’re using your friends and personal contacts to move generally unneeded goods around the economy. All to make a profit for yourself.
I think we have a new winner now in the “lowest form of commerce” category though: referrer spam. I simply don’t understand the point of this silly practice. If you don’t know what referrer spam is, here is the “technology” in a nutshell:
Websites maintain automatic lists of other web sites which link to them. This is useful, for instance, if I write an article and I want to see who is linking to my article and what people might be saying about it. So every day or so, I check my “referrer log” for new links. Well, what referrer spammers are now doing is polluting my log file with obviously fake referrers like “vicodin-for-free.info” and “sex-with-jenna-jamison.org”. So as a result, I have to wade through hundreds of these links in order to get to real referring links.
What I don’t understand is what the point of it is. The referrer log is only accessible by me and surely nobody technical enough to be checking their own referrer logs would actually click on one of those links. I’ve heard another reason spammers do this is because some people display their “most recent referrers” live on their sites. If you’re doing this, STOP. It provides no value and only perpetuates the myth that referrer spam has a chance achieving its intended effect.
As an aside, the best way I’ve found to get around the referrer spam problem is to use Refer 2.0 to check your referrers. Refer 2.0 can sort referrers by frequency and most referrer spam has a frequency of one, so you can easily ignore any referrers who haven’t provided you at least two referrals.
Also, for a more complete statistical tracking package, make sure and check out Shaun Inman’s ShortStat. Shaun’s working on a spicy new beta right now which is quite nice, but in the meantime, feel free to use the current version. You can have a look at what the output looks like here.
Tonight, I am 29, and tomorrow morning, December 1st, I will turn 30. Hot damn! That decade just flew by! The whole decade thing is not that big of a deal to me because I feel like we count things by tens only for neurological convenience… not to mention that no other animal gives a damn about the number ten.
As many people know, the next version of Flash — codenamed “8-Ball” — is currently in beta and has been previewed at Macromedia conferences in the last several weeks. I have beta-tested versions of Flash in the past, but unfortunately, I neglected to register for this one. I am the worst kind of beta tester. I download the new builds and never end up providing much feedback to the development team. I’ll be the first to admit, I beta-test mainly to plan future content releases as opposed to actually helping fix bugs. I suppose it would be better to help out with the bugs and all, but as a major content provider, I figure just helping to push the technology is my contribution to Macromedia’s success.
Yes, I know… this is hardly worth dedicating an entire post to, but has anyone figured out how to use the backspace button as a way to move backward through browser history in Mac Firefox? This shortcut exists in IE, Safari, and I believe possibly even PC Firefox, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to make it work on a Mac. There doesn’t seem to be a preference item for it, and I haven’t heard of any extensions to enable it either.