How to Ensure your Site is Protected by Referrer Bouncer Plugin

My Referrer Bouncer plugin for WordPress Publishing Platform has been rather popular plugin with WordPress bloggers. It simply bounces referrer spammers back to their own domain, effectively forcing them to spam their own servers. It is a simple plugin, does one thing and does it well.

Sometimes people want to find out if the plugin is really working or not. It is because I do not provide any kind of statistics or boast on how much spam it has eaten in order to keep the plugin simple and super fast.

Here is a simple way by which you can test the effectiveness of the plugin. What you will do is that you will pose a referrer spammer to your own blog (after installing and activating the plugin following the instructions).

Watch how it unceremoniously kicks you out

The following test was done on fussychicken.com blog. The owner recently installed the referrer bouncer plugin on the blog.

To test the functioning of the plugin I open a telnet session with this blog server. My commands below are in bold. I am assuming the role of a referrer spammer bot who wants to wrongly add www.poker.com as a referrer to this blog.

$ telnet www.fussychicken.com 80
Trying 72.9.232.146…
Connected to fussychicken.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET / HTTP/1.0
Host: www.fussychicken.com
Referer: www.poker.com

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 18:32:05 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.11
Location: www.poker.com
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

Connection closed by foreign host.

As you can see from above the server sends a 302 (temporary redirect), which essentially tells the spammer bot to go spam its own domain which in this example was www.poker.com. Plain and simple.