Deltanine

I hadn't checked the site statistics for about 6 weeks, and was amazed to find the number of visitors had increased almost tenfold. However these visitors aren't genuine - they are referrer bots. Even though I've removed the site statistics page these scum bags spam "hits" on sites in order to be featured in the "most referrals" section of websites, and by extension increase their ranking with Google.

The problem is they eat up a ton of bandwidth - over 5GB worth in the last few weeks, bandwidth which I pay for.

So I've implemented a more robust system which should redirect most of this scum to a "forbidden" 403 error page, and this reduce bandwidth. I don't expect the problem will decrease however, as like email spam they don't really care whether they make a "hit" or not since they're not paying for it.

I can see a time in the future whereby there will need to be a trust/verification system in order to use the internet as the levels of traffic generated by these criminals escalates beyond simple email spamming and website referrer spam.

Update 21/11/05: I've managed to cut traffic by about 90%, saving a ton of bandwidth - even though I've used 180MB just in "Error 403" pages alone!