More on Banning Link Spammers

Wed, Dec 8, 2004 with tags meta

Looking through my weblogs I saw that I also was getting a lot of hits from http://www.xopy.com/friendslinks.php, at first I thought it was a nifty site like del.icio.us that allowed you to see friends links. It turns out that they’re part of a group called AdminShop, and they’re basically doing link spamming. So I needed to add them to my block list.

Now this seems to cut down on most of my link spamming. However, it still isn’t ideal. I guess in an ideal world I’d set up small little CGI that I’d force them to. Once they hit they CGI they’d get their IP address logged and immediately sent to pf for banning of the client. I suppose I could whip something like that up pretty easily, but I don’t have time right now. And no, that doesn’t mean it will be done by tonight, I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do before then.

Also, I switched many of my redirects from 302 (temporary) to 301 (permanent) yesterday, however BlogLines doesn’t seem to have taken the hint. Any ideas on how you can force BlogLines to recognize a 301 and update its database if its repeatedly received? Also, I’m wondering why the request from BlogLines don’t include the If-modified-since or the If-none-match headers? If they did it would save them bandwidth and the hassle of having to parse thousands of feeds that aren’t updated on a daily basis.