You may have noticed that this site was “borked,” or down, or inaccessible, or busted, for the bulk of yesterday. I was doing some technical tweaking to try and stop a sickening flood of referral spam, but accidentally knocked out my website. Ugly timing on that one, because I had just announced my First Annual Readership Survey. Thankfully, ERD’s brilliant part-time web developer Mark Sergienko was on the scene via Gmail Chat, and thanks to his careful salvage work, the site was back up by 11:30 pm. My deepest apologies for my incorrigible incompetence. Please note that the survey is up and running again, and I would still very much love to hear what you have to say. Click here if you’ve got about 2 minutes to spare.

Anyway, what’s this referral spam I’m talking about? Well, most website operators like to see which websites are linking to their own site, and they check up on their referral statistics almost daily. Referral spam is when malicious and devoted spammers try to get your attention by flooding your statistics with fake links to their own sites.

Normally, I can check out my “referrals” page, and it gives me a nice and easy-to-read list of all the sites that are linking to me. Unfortunately, with the spammers at work, now all I see is a mile-long list of fictional, non-existent, over-the-top porno URLs. Take a look: this is the text-only file of all the sites that have “linked” to me so far in May. As you can see, most of them are ridiculous, bogus XXX sites. None of these sites (the sketchy-looking ones, anyway) actually contain links to my site. It’s all zombie spambot computers sending out signals just pretending to have links there.

LAME. They do this JUST in case I happen to have my blog set to automatically publish the list of sites that link to me, which will in turn boost their own sites’ ranking in Google. Obnoxious, meddlesome and kind of offensive, to say the least. Anyway, stopping this kind of spam turns out to be just as obnoxious.

Here’s what I’ve tried so far:
- Modifying a file called .htaccess. Tried that, but it turns out it’s an easy way to destroy your website. Don’t do that unless you know what you’re doing.
- Using a plugin called Bad Behavior. Been using that for two months, still no luck.
- Using a plugin called Referrerl Karma. Tried that: it hasn’t been updated since 2005, installation is absurdly complicated for a third-party WordPress plugin, and it’s not even compatible with the latest version of WordPress.
- Asking Metafilter. No help there.
- Reading about it. Nobody seems to have tackled this topic since around Jan. 2006. Informational sites abound on diagnosing the problem, but none on curing it.

Anyway, long story short, I’ve still got spammer troubles, but the website’s back up again. Thanks for your patience, and if you haven’t already done it, go tell me what you love & hate about this website on my First Annual Readership Survey.