I can’t emphasize just how much I hate spammers.  It’s come to the point where I regard their activities as theft of service. 

As I mentioned on Tuesday, I got a warning from my webhosting company that I was using too many resources on the shared server.  A quick check of logs showed that the majority of my traffic was driven by referral spammers.  Their requests were hitting Expression Engine and the database, but nothing was being displayed.  Using the EE Blacklist module I had it write an .htaccess file that returned a 403 error (Access Forbidden) to any request that met the blacklist criteria (such as having “viagra” in the referral URL). 

Until checking the stats, though, I didn’t really have a handle on the real size of the problem.  Here is the request status report for this domain for just yesterday:

That tells me that 46772 spam referral requests were rejected before they had a chance to hit the database.  This definitely reduced the load on the DB, as shown in the table in the extended text.

The data for 10/13 is incomplete, as that’s today.  But the difference between 10/11 and 10/12 is quite large, going from 995,418 to 243,434 queries.

Details for ExpEngine from 2005-10-03 to 2005-11-02

Day Disk Usage Connects Queries (Conueries) (Ratio) 2005-10-03 52.996 MB 50953 1101616 2.375 MCn 0.865 2005-10-04 54.277 MB 31219 623202 1.404 MCn 0.798 2005-10-05 55.949 MB 38577 872707 1.837 MCn 0.905 2005-10-06 59.941 MB 26323 595988 1.254 MCn 0.906 2005-10-07 61.781 MB 32295 653220 1.461 MCn 0.809 2005-10-08 62.094 MB 34573 636960 1.501 MCn 0.737 2005-10-09 62.426 MB 49681 973017 2.215 MCn 0.783 2005-10-10 63.047 MB 54033 1115019 2.466 MCn 0.825 2005-10-11 63.867 MB 49832 995418 2.241 MCn 0.799 2005-10-12 64.250 MB 12745 243434 0.562 MCn 0.764 2005-10-13 64.406 MB 2183 41183 0.096 MCn 0.755 Totals: 60.458 MB 382414 7851764 17.412 MCn 0.821