WordPress Plugin: Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer

By Angsuman Chakraborty, Gaea News Network
Friday, October 7, 2005

Name: Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer
Version: 1.2
Category: WordPress Plugin
Compatibility: WordPress 1.5x and above

Overview
This is the new version of the popular Referrer Bouncer Plugin for WordPress. It is recommended upgrade for existing users.

A Plugin to bounce back referrer spam attempts; requires no upfront configuration, no mod-rewrite. It is like the strong silent bouncer at your favorite club.

It does one job and does it well. Enough said.

Enhancements / What’s New?

  • It ignores empty lines or lines with only whitespace characters in the referer.txt file.
  • Updated list of default referrers.

The changes were prompted by user feedback.

Please refer to the Referrer Bouncer documentation for full documentation and installation details.

Note:
Your wp-content directory should be writable by Apache.
The next version will use the database and remove this restriction.

Download here.

Discussion
June 11, 2010: 2:22 am

They are into my permanent ban list. Hasta-la-vista morons - my-pills.be!

January 25, 2008: 2:37 am

Can you introduce the mechanism of the “referer spam” policy?

August 28, 2006: 7:31 am

Wonderful idea. Thanks.

August 28, 2006: 6:14 am

Maybe an idea: Like Bad Behavior, Spam Karma und Akismet has, you can maybe include a functionality to count up all blocked attempts vs. all access attempts. So we can display the utility of your plugin on our blogs.

x out of y referrals where blocked by Angsuman’s Referral Bouncer

Maybe a bit to long? Any other ideas? This surely requires two database entries.

May 19, 2006: 2:03 pm

[...] Well, one thing I like about Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer already is that it does NOT mess with comment moderation like every other anti comment spam plugin I tried did. Comments that are from posters who have not posted before (and are humans filling in the form the old fashioned way) go into moderation, which is as it should be. I do hope he releases the new version though since I really don’t like the permissioning required to run this pup. [...]

February 7, 2006: 10:16 pm

> Isn’t the damage already done by referer spam by the time wordpress gets ahold of the request?

There are several WordPress plugins and stat packages which display referrers, often publicly. This plugin prevents them from registering spam referrers.

Whether it also prevents Apache log from registering the spammers is an open question. In my system it appears to do so. However I haven’t exhaustively investigated.

It significantly reduces your bandwidth and CPU consumption by bouncing spammers upfront without incurring the cost of dynamically creating and serving the page.

Hope that answers your question.

February 7, 2006: 10:06 pm

Forgive my ignorance, but what does this plugin actually do?

Isn’t the damage already done by referer spam by the time wordpress gets ahold of the request?

December 27, 2005: 1:02 pm

[...] A new version of the plugin is available with some enhancements. Please read the details here. The download link below provides the latest version. [...]


Renbo
November 22, 2005: 10:50 am

Ti Iblan! A esli eto podstava???

November 17, 2005: 1:02 am

[...] They are into my permanent ban list. Hasta-la-vista morons - my-pills.be! [...]

October 7, 2005: 6:25 pm

[...]   Angsuman’s Referrer Bouncer,说实话这个到底是干嘛的我还没明白,看介绍应该是防止垃圾Referrer的。 by Scott | posted in WordPress Plugins Trackback URL | Comment RSS Feed Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links [...]

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