Top referrers = drug websites?

[david b]

I clicked on active threads to see what is new here and on the left hand side of the page is a list of "top referrers".

They appear to be from drug "spam" websites....

WTF?

 

[Stephan]

Rangefinders seem to be a sort of drug to most people here. 😀


As my spinning brain can attest to, mine is surrently beer and white russians...

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Indeed they are. You see, they have no problem clogging your e-mail, rendering website stats meaningless, and endangering your life. It's the majestic mountains way.

 

[RJBender]

Indeed they are. You see, they have no problem clogging your e-mail, rendering website stats meaningless, and endangering your life. It's the majestic mountains way.

I went to the zoloft website shown at the top of the list. Clicked on view source. Then I typed "rangefinderforum.com" into the FIND box under EDIT. It's not on their website.

When I go to another top referrer http://contaxg.com/, they have a link to RFF. I can view the source and find "rangefinderforum.com" on the website.

Does that indicate that the zoloft people are trying to get e-mail addresses from RFF? I've read a little about "robots" that harvest email addresses from websites but I don't understand how this process works.

Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question. I'm not a website developer . 😕

R.J.

 

[Kin Lau]

It's called "referrer spamming". Basically with every webhit on RFF, a piece of info is given "the following site referred me". In this case, someone wrote a script to keep hitting RFF with this garbage.

Still, it's better than the sex-ads site that was spamming us a few months ago.

 

[RJBender]

So it has something to do with "cookies"?
I noticed when I log off of RFF I get a message that all cookies have been cleared.

Several years ago, I subscribed to several mail lists. Robert Monaghan used to repost our replies on his website complete with our e-mail addresses. He never asked for my permission to do so.

Before I changed servers, I used to get at least 100 pieces of spam per day. I read about 'robots" that harvest e-mail addresses from websites and suspect that's what may have happened in my case. I complained on one list after several of us received the same unusual spam message. The next week he moved his website from SMU.EDU to http://medfmt.8k.com/mf/index.html. The e-mail addresses are still there.

R.J.

 

[Socke]

R.J. you may be onto something, e-mail harvesting is the most probable reason for the hits. The referrers help with google rating but only the referred side, so that's actualy good for RFF 🙂

I'm at 100 spams a day, too. Most of it is automagicaly handled by thunderbirds spam filter and around 10 or 15 I have to mark myself so the filter learns it.

 

[RJBender]

Socke,

I have one e-mail address that I use for photo forums now. If I start getting too much junk mail, I'll delete it and create a new one. All my eBay activity is done with a separate e-mail address. That way, I don't have to filter the mail. So far, it is working. 🙂

Maybe the drug sellers think we are good prospects for their medications! 😛 Should people ask their doctors about Zoloft if they have GAS? 😀 🙄 😛

R.J.

 

[RJBender]

If the drug websites are trying to harvest e-mail addresses from RFF, Jorge can just block their IP addresses, right?

Is it possible to write a program that checks the referring site for a link and if it's not there the referring site is blocked?

R.J.

 

[wierdcollector]

Personally I use Yahoo for my forum mail. Surprisingly enough, I belong to 76 groups on Yahoo alone, then RF Forums, Best Stuff, Photo Net, Delphi, MSN, Ebay Groups, The Camera Collector, Pentax Users, Shutterbug Forums, and Ebay Community Town Square, yet with all these forums (I always choose the No email option as I view answers online) I only receive between 10-25 spam emails/day. I use a different address for Ebay and personal email, but sometimes I use Yahoo for that too. Guess I'm just lucky. If I answered half of them I'd have millions of dollars in loans, bad eyes from squinting, one sore arm and be able to run the three legged race all by myself.

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

If the drug websites are trying to harvest e-mail addresses from RFF, Jorge can just block their IP addresses, right?

Is it possible to write a program that checks the referring site for a link and if it's not there the referring site is blocked?

Yes, but that gets you nowhere. The bot could be running from another server, not necessarily from the same IP address where their Web site is. You could, however, block these "referring" sites so they quit rendering your stats meaningless.

 

[RJBender]

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/about_us.php

http://www.projecthoneypot.org/about_us.php

Gabriel, doesn't the bot's activity affect the time I have to wait for a RFF page to load?
Have you heard about "Project Honey Pot"?
http://www.projecthoneypot.org/about_us.php

R.J.

 

[XAos]

Referrer spam isn't really about email harvesting. That would show up as regular visits. Referrer spam isn't even about getting people here to go look there. It's ALL about google crawling RFF, finding urls of other sites, and increasing their desirability score. It gets them a higher ranking when people google for anything they show up for, even if it has nothing to do with anything contained on RFF. Their address showing up in the referrer logs here gets them a higher ranking when you google for 'viagara ciali$ prescription drugs" (and anything else not particularly related to their product, that is a keyword on their web site that you might google for like tri-x, pan-f, fungus, leica"

 

[RJBender]

Referrer spam isn't really about email harvesting. That would show up as regular visits. Referrer spam isn't even about getting people here to go look there. It's ALL about google crawling RFF, finding urls of other sites, and increasing their desirability score. It gets them a higher ranking when people google for anything they show up for, even if it has nothing to do with anything contained on RFF. Their address showing up in the referrer logs here gets them a higher ranking when you google for 'viagara ciali$ prescription drugs" (and anything else not particularly related to their product, that is a keyword on their web site that you might google for like tri-x, pan-f, fungus, leica"

XAos,

Thanks for the answer! If someone with 500 posts, for example, included their website's URL and the words "St. Louis photographer" in their RFF signature, would that increase their ranking if someone was using Google to search for a photographer in St. Louis? 😕 Or would the RFFer have to include meta tags in their signature to get a higher Google ranking? 😉 Is this a good site for writing meta tags?
http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html
You see where I'm going with this, right? 😀 😀 😀

R.J.

 

[Poptart]

Cookies? Cookies are good!

 

[RJBender]

Cookies? Cookies are good!

Yeah Pop, but it's impossible to take just one byte. 😀

R.J.