Mick's World

After moving this site from blog.micksworld.com to micksworld.com i haven’t received much spam. Usually when i get an influx of traffic there are always a few spam comments that good ol’ Askimet sorts out for me.

In the last few days there has been none whatsoever. Perhaps due to the domain changing, within their database of domains to spam the old one doesn’t exist. Well it’s a 301 redirect to micksworld.com, so don’t spam bots like 301’s? That’s only going to last so long, however if that is the case it’s interesting.

So i started thinking that perhaps a spambot’s user agent could be detected and then given a 301 redirect. I had a look around and found some good info on Neutralizing the Spambot.

In particular the section describing how to detect the user agent and serve them another page. Well what about detecting the user agent and then giving them a 301 to another site? Or better still what about giving them a 301 back to your domain name which then detects the user agent and gives a 301 and so on, pushing them into a loop of redirection to ultimately timeout due to bad redirection.

Hey spambot, do you like apples? Well how do you like them apples?!

Here’s the code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^BADUSERAGENT
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com [R=301,L]

Now obviously there is going to have to be some looking through logs to find user agents of these evil spam bots. The same could be applied with an IP of course. The only thing is that you don’t want to be doing this to normal users cause that wouldn’t be too much fun for them.

Another thing to note is that this is a down right dirty approach, but if you hate spammers then a man’s gotta do, right? Also this is going to send a number of requests to your server each time until it times out, but hopefully that will give those spambots the message.

Now to see how this goes in the wild. Next time the spambots come crawling out i’ll be adding them to the list of user agents in my devious loop of redirection. Until then, no spamburgers for me.