Looking good so far, will check back in 36 hours or so and see.

–Ben (ICB in #wordpress)

Great script, but I believe I found a bug in the code that checks if the tables exist. I kept getting the notice that the script was making the tables and it kept dropping my log table.

It seems you perform a SELECT statement trying to get ref_karma_logs.msg_id which don’t exist in the tables created by the script on my server. I changed it to trying to get ref_karma_logs.id and the script works fine, printing that the tables already exist instead of creating them. This is on line 89 or so in the script.

Otherwise, great script. The way it works is very smart and a great idea. I can see this becomming as useful and (sadly) as needed as Spam Karma.

LordRich: Try WannaBrowser – it’s web-based. You can send false referrers with it and see the results.

Referrer Karma

Referrer Karma – tool for blocking referrer spam. Looks interesting. [Via]…

links for 2005-02-20

Save Toby A very clever (and evil) idea! I love it! (categories: clever evil) Ask MeFi – Footpath Protocol…

I’ve started using RK now. Very nice! I like the way it works. Thanks for clearing up the SK issues too. I’ll have to take a closer look at it next.

There are sites that consistently will not let me in when I am browsing from work, due to ref-karma. Pleeaaaaaaase do something about that.

Not to mention that the way it’s coded now, it will work with ANY user hosted blogging software. Any user hosted website for that matter. Makes the tool much more useful.

Dave, I have been using Referral Karma on Blogging Pro and lately people have been complaining that they are being sent to the referrer banned page when they come to Blogging Pro from the WordPress Dashboard.

Any ideas why?

Thanks Dave, I’ll upgrade and see what happens.

Maledei: RK is not based on URL or keyword blacklisting. I might add a user blacklist at some point, but this is not a priority, as these usually yield a disproportionate amount of false positives. Instead, RK builds its blacklist live from people visiting your site from somewhere else. Think of that blacklist as more of a cache of which sites RK thought were OK (so it doesn’t have to check them again the next time). If you browse to the “show list” screen, you can switch a blacklist entry to whitelist and vice-versa…

HtH

If your not worried about referral lists, then yes, you can simply sit back and let it do it’s thing. However, if you are running it, then you must be concerned about referral lists.

I take a look at it about once a day. Make sure there are no false-positives. If there are, I usually switch the entries to the whitelist. I also make sure it didn’t let something go through that shouldn’t have and move them to the blacklist. I’ve only had to move 1 entry to the blacklist, but I have moved about 5 entries to the whitelist. Mostly obscure search engine referrals.

Hey Dr. Dave, any chance you could work on the colors a little? I’ve had to make some minor modifications to the main file to get the black links on black backgrounds to show up better. Maybe the background colors could be a little more saturated (is that the correct term?) so it would be more like black links on grey for blacklisted items.

I changed the link color to yellow and changed the main page paragraph with the links for “Show Logs” and “Show white/blacklist” adding ‘class=”status_msg”‘ to the paragraph tag.

Just a thought…

Also, any idea why the links only show up on one of the systems I look at that page with? The rest of the systems just see the text as if the link was stripped. No huge biggie, I just copy the text and paste it into a new tab. Just curious…

You really want to put the code described above in stop 5 in the index.php file located in the “install directory” of WordPress. Not the theme’s version of index.php.

You want to catch the reference just as soon as possible.

I have the latest version installed (1.4) and since March has come on my server I can already see the effects of using RK. However, Some of these spam requests have gotten through in some cases whereas in another case, RK works as defined and gives a 403 error to the client.

An example is 3 recent requests I found in my access log for Apache all within the same minute. The person is trying to spam the same URL in each case, but while the first 2 are blocked an given a 403 (as reported in the log) the last one is allowed and shows up in my stats generated for the month.

So far out of only 3 hours of the month of March, I have had 5 403 errors sent to clients for referral spamming and 3 spam URLs made it into my logs.

The only explination I can offer is the domain that is spamming me is using IP addresses that I have already blacklisted in SK (as you recommended in a comment on my blog) and are being picked up by RK and showing the 403 only some of the time. The domain name that is attempting to show up in my logs does not appear on the white or black list of RK. This may be a possible bug? Feel free to contact me if you want more information.

I love when users reply to each other’s questions… That should happen more often!
I have little to add, except to say that all of the above is correct:
- you want to insert the code as early as possible, so as to avoid any unnecessary processing…
- there is indeed a case where spammers can make it through: if the URL is unreachable, RK doesn’t block it, but returns ‘false’. This is because I’d rather take the safe road by default (I deal with enough pissed-off users because of SK’s “tough” approach to borderline cases). It’s basically up to you, the user, to see how you wanna handle these cases. Retrospectively, especially now that I have added an automated meta-refresh (most people don’t even know that they have been “blacklisted”, since it shows the page immediately), it might be a good idea to block this case too.

Upon seeing a value of ‘false’ returned by the call, you could either call die() (but that would still be counted as a hit and appear in your stats, I think), or better yet, use RK’s function: kick_some_ass() that will give the usual “click here to be redirected msg”, log their attempt (but not blacklist them) and put a 403. The resulting code would be something like:
if (! check_referrer())
kick_some_ass();

Dave, regarding colors: I’m totally open to enhancements. That’s why I made an effort to separate them nicely in the CSS. If you have made change you think would improve the look, just send them to me and I’ll add them to the release (same goes for any code improvement anybody might want to submit).

Yes definately. My comment spam slowed to a trickle after installing RK (I was already using SK).

I’m getting a lot of referrer spam (203 requests yesterday) from highprofitclub.com and ref-karma isn’t even touching them. I don’t even see the original requests in the RK logs. I’ve added an index.php with the RK include into every directory two days ago, and since the include is in my WP index.php, it should be included with my custom 404 as well. Anyone else getting this? Any thoughts on how they’re getting through?

Thanks dr Dave for the update.

scrap that, it’s back again. any other suggestions?

great fantastic

you re genius
after spamkarma referer karma
i ll going ask j chirac to give you the “legion d honneur” )

Well, the new version is working, but it’s blocking everything. Here’s a snippet:
http://www.idowens.com/2005/02/24/firefox-update/ – Added as Blacklist entry (id: 39, looked for string: macmanx.com). – IP: 4.62.146.158 – Timestamp: 2005-03-04 17:59:49
http://www.idowens.com/2005/02/24/firefox-update/ – Blocked attempt (403). – IP: 4.62.146.158 – Timestamp: 2005-03-04 17:59:49
http://blogged.btvillarin.com/2005/03/02/received-ez-lap-part-1/ – Added as Blacklist entry (id: 38, looked for string: macmanx.com). – IP: 4.62.146.158 – Timestamp: 2005-03-04 17:59:04
http://blogged.btvillarin.com/2005/03/02/received-ez-lap-part-1/ – Blocked attempt (403). – IP: 4.62.146.158 – Timestamp: 2005-03-04 17:59:04

As you can see from the two sites, string: macmanx.com does exist. So far, every referrer today has been blocked for that reason.

Reverting back to v1.4 stopped the “everybody is blacklisted” problem. I’ll have to to add highprofitclub.com to the often-intimidating .htaccess file.

Indeed, the last release had a bug in it (never modify your code at 4am). Fixed it and it seems ok now (at least not blocking everybody indiscriminately). Please anybody let me know if you notice a change in the way it handles unreachable URLs (as it should).

Anybody who’s downloaded 1.5r1, please upgrade to 1.5r2 now!

Not a problem at all. I’m just happy to have this available.

Wow, you’re up so late working on the plugin. That’s so awesome. Thanks for being so dedicated, man. I didn’t get any good sites banned, thank goodness. I had highprofitclub in my .htaccess file, but I’ll remove it and see if RK 1.6 does the trick. w00t!

thanks again for a kickass product Dr Dave. Quick question – how does this interact with the Spam-karma “try to filter trackback spam (experimental)” option? is this option needed? Will enabling it create any unwanted side effects?

thanks in advance!

It’s working great so far. It must have blocked doobu.com over 80 times last night.

Resetting the tables resets the log and the blacklist/whitelist.

Well, you’ll loose all your whitelist and blacklist data. But the blacklist is repopulated quickly, and I start my whitelist off by searching Technorati and going through each site that already links to me. Not too big of a hassle.

Cool, thanks for the ideas!

Well, it’s been 24 hours since I have v1.6 running. RK blacklisted doobu.com and blocked it 243 time, but doobu.com still made it through 73 times. I can live with that, it’s just interesting how it made it through.

curious that doobu.com is getting through for you, macmanx. rk has caught 403 instances of it for me. no spam whatsoever has gotten through since i upgraded to 1.6. yay!

Ray, it sounds like you skipped step 4.

I haven’t got to step 4 yet. It throws the error on step 3 when I’m doing the checks.

Well, RK worked GREAT for me the first couple of days–then it just “stopped” for some reason. Installed on 3/3/05, it “caught” a bunch of stuff from the usual suspects for the next two days, and I saw NO RefSpam coming through at all during that period. Then over the next two days it shows a handful of “whitelist” actions, that’s all.

And I’ve noticed that I’m being inundated with RefSpam once again, since that time (two days ago or so). It’s almost like the RefSpammers quickly figured out a way around it, and I’m getting nothing but RefSpam currently.

Any ideas would be appreciated (currently using the 1.6 version).

PLEASE HELP! I mean, I am getting SWAMPED by all the usual suspects! All of a sudden from what I can see RK is doing NOTHING for me. I even deleted and reinstalled.

Why would it work for a couple of days then stop?

Any insights would be MOST appreciated!

Nice plugin. Is there a way to show the logs without enabling the password?

No, not “whitelisting” of the bad guys. I mean it just shows that some legitimate referrers were whitelisted. No “bouncing” of bad referrers, or blacklisting of bad referrers or anything. Then nothing at all. The bad guys are pummeling me.

If a legit site is blacklisted, an innocent user will see a screen telling them that it has been, but he will be presented with a link to click to go to your site. This way, the referrer won’t appear in your logs, bad bots will be turned away (the screen is essentially a 403), and legitimate visitors will still be allowed to view your site. If the site in question is white-listed, then the visitor will never see the screen in question. So, the impact on legitimate visitors is nill-to-none, but check your logs at least once a day and make whitelist/blacklist corrections when appropriate.

Hi!

I installed 1.6 about a week ago, and it worked for a few days, but now it seems to not work at all! Accesses to the blog are not shown in the logs, and none of the poker sites seem to get blacklisted. I’ve tried resetting the tables, etc, but that hasn’t worked.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I’m using the Spam Karma integration, if that makes any difference.

Thanks!

bursty pants of joy:
“how strange, my installation still works brilliantly.”

Well, bursty, that’s real fine for you. But ours doesn’t. Telling us that yours DOES, does not do one thing to solve the problem.

Hi guys,

I’ve dropped the ref_karma and ref_karma_logs tables (using PHPMyAdmin), recreated them by accessing the referrer-karma.php file (and it says they were created), but it’s still not working. After accessing the site a couple of times, I looked in PHPMA, and there were no entries in either of the tables. So obviously, something has gone wrong with the insertion into the tables.

I’m not seeing any errors, either.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Yes, if a connection is not blocked there will be no log record. Well, there will be a record saying that the site was allowed, but you will not see it on each and every link from the site, just the first time.

Jason, that’s the log that Referrer Karma generates. Dr Dave has just altered it to display five days instead of three.

To those who are not getting any results: I highly suspect you missed something in the install… But definitely don’t have the time to guide anybody through that right now, sorry.

For the rest:
– RK doesn’t log anything for connections that are allowed through (except for the first whitelisting) as it would seriously put a overhead on your server. Writing logs to the DB is somewhat costly, better do it as little as possible.
– The number of days an entry is kept, can be changed in rk_settings… it’s at 5 right now, I think, but anything you like is ok (don’t be afraid to put a small number: as I said many times, it is not very costly for RK to build back that table and it insures that false positives do not stay too long, even if you do not remove them manually).
– To access your stats and whitelist, the password-in-url trick is indeed the recommended way. It is in no way secure, because there’s no real reason to make it secure. Basically, the only reason this section is not public is the ability to black/whitelist or reset the lists that could be used by spammers if it was fully open. As it is, I doubt it’d be worth anybody’s time to try to get hold of your password just to screw around with your lists (they do not actually *block* anybody from seeing your site, remember?). Just keep it discreet enough.

To publish my list without revealing my password, I used a trick Mark Jaquith came up with. Simply insert a similar line in your .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^rklog/?$ /blog/wp-content/referrer-karma.php?ref-karma-setup=true&pwd=[your password]&show_logs=1 [QSA,L]

Feel free to use it if you know what you are doing…

BTW, for those who are alpha-testing SK2, RK won’t talk to SK2, but disabling SK1 (while keeping the tables it built) should still keep it fairly efficient. I’ll upgrade RK to talk to SK2 sometimes next week…

JASON:

This seems to be an “undocumented feature.” All you have to do is go to the “RK Setup” URL the instruction to which are found in the rk_settings.php file where it states:

“If you set this value, you can access the setup screen at all time, using the URI: http://yourdomain.com/path_to_your_file/referrer-karma.php?ref-karma-setup=true&pwd=***your password***”

Then, you add the additional command: “&show_logs=1″ to the end of the URI.

Thus for my ‘blog, which is at http://www.polhemus.cc/blog, I enter the following URI:

http://www.polhemus.cc/blog/wp-content/ref-karma/referrer-karma.php?ref-karma-setup=true&pwd=mahler914&show_logs=1
and I get the log that looks like what Dr. Dave has.

For those of you that want to test RK to see what happens when a bad referral comes to the site. There is a Firefox extension that I use to test things like RK. It’s called RefSpoof. It works great and is a great way to see if RK is working and doing it’s job.

If you have RK adjusting your .htaccess file, you may want to be careful. RK will ban your IP when you test it and you might get locked out of your site. If you have access to the .htaccess file, you can just remove the ban from the file, but be careful.

“…you guys like doing things the hard way…”

Um, how is it the “hard way” just to include the “show logs” command in the URI?

“Um, how is it the “hard way” just to include the “show logs” command in the URI?”

No, just the fact that you mentioned that as the only way to do it. Most people would be delighted to know that there is an admin interface with a handy-dandy “Show Logs” link.

“Is there a similar logging facility for Spam Karma?”

Yes. Log in to your WP admin interface and go to Options/Spam Karma.

All of a sudden, I have had nothing in my referrer logs for about three days.

Mer?

Rori, what do your RK logs say? Is RK blocking every referrer?

Thank you Dr Dave! I am sure it is plugins like yours that make them take a break!

PaulaO, I am not Dr Dave, I am Eric. And that is a separate plugin for WordPress that is NOT referral Karma. it allows you to put Referral Karma stats on your page. It provides a link to setu pyour Referral Karma but it does not operate properly. I have it installed myself. Referral Karma is not a WordPress Plugin. you installed Referral Karma Stats by this dude: http://mattread.com/archives/2005/03/rk-stats/

As I said in my previous comment, you need to read the instructions on that page i just entered above in order to fix or understand why that link is not working.

Hi again, I think something might be wrong with mine? I have been getting tons of spam hits listed, which is great, but I also seem to get too many (I think) false positives. I noticed a big string of them right in a row from a legit site, so I decided to try to get the page myself, but clicking through on a site that wasn’t whitelisted yet, but should be. So I went to a forum I use, and clicked my homepage link. I got the click through page, but it kept refreshing like every second, I didn’t even have time to read it, I finally just clicked the link just to get it to stop. Then when I checked my logs immediately after, it is blacklisting the referrer and the ip, and showing up each time in the log for each time it refreshed. How do I fix this? How can people whitelist themselves if they can’t even read the page?

Hey Mindy, like MacManX indicated above, it’s probably best if you whitelist all the sites you know are good that link to you. Everytime I need to whitelist something in the logs, I also add it in the whitelist file so it doesn’t get blacklisted again by mistake.

I think the way it works is that it’ll give a 404, but redirect to your site anyways. By doing this, it doesn’t touch your referrer logs. Someone will correct me if I’m wrong.

simply blocking the referrer spam isn’t actually helping much – how about for every request that is blacklisted, return a 301 code redirecting them back to the site they are spamming?
And how about a perl script which will read the blacklisted referers and remove relevant lines from an Apache log?

Eric, that’s what whitelist.txt is for. Just add /wp-admin/ to it.

How do I block sites that referrer karma doesn’t? So far a site has referred traffic to my site and it’s all spam, however RK didn’t notice. It says “Can’t reach referrer URL: Ignoring.” Can I make a blacklist.txt? Or ban IPs? Or maybe I just need to wait a few days and see if it work’s itself out?

Karma Dashboard Plugin

Last week, I installed Referer Karma because I was sick of stupid referer spam. On thing that I wasn’t the biggest fan of was the lack of real integration into Wordpress. I understand why; it was meant to be usable to more than us Wordpress-ers. …

I have $ban_unreachable_urls = true; and they are not getting banned. Help please. I just installed RK the other day so I’ve got the newest release.

Well, I was on vacation…

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been spending much time away from news sources, computers, and the usual suspects, and actually trying to get out of the house once in a while and see actual human beings in person. So I haven’t written to…

Is there any way to get RK to check to referrer page for strings other than my host before banning the referrer? My site’s address is http://www.randall100.f2s.com, but http://www.underblog.co.uk also points there, and pages with an underblog.co.uk link are banned at the moment. Also, I’m finding random blogs on a webring I’m on get banned too. I’m assuming that it’s something to do with this code:
if (strpos($content, $this_server) !== FALSE)
{
mysql_query("INSERT INTO `ref_karma` SET `key` = 'white', `value` = '" . mysql_escape_string($ref_server_short) . "', `last_mod` = NOW()") or error_msg("Cannot insert whitelist entry.", false, true);
mysql_query("INSERT INTO `ref_karma_logs` SET `ip` = '". mysql_escape_string($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']) . "', `ref` = '". mysql_escape_string($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) . "', `msg` = 'Added as Whitelist entry (id: ". mysql_insert_id() . ", URL contained: $this_server).', `msg_type` = 'white', `ts` = NOW()");

return true;
}

But I’m a bit rubbish at this sort of thing and whenever I try to tweak it I end up causing errors or making my sight unreachable. Can anyone help?

Hi

I am having a problem with a certain legitimate URL which hangs my ref-karma. I will take a look at the code myself but using Curl on your site I also get an error:-

$ curl -e “http://www.skipressworld.com/us/en/daily_news/2004/07/pistehorscom_r
eleases_200304_backcountry_fatality_report.html?cat=Adventure” http://unknownge
nius.com/blog/wordpress/ref-karma/
curl: (52) Empty reply from server

any ideas?

Ok I think I’ve understood the issue in comment 125. The problem lies with ref-karma’s handling of IFramces and Scripts. It has to parse these itself as they put together at the client end and they may contain the referring URL.

The URL I gave sends ref-karma into a loop, it is basically a “spider trap”, processing megabytes of data. I think the recusion level probably wants to be lower. Interested in comments.

Hi Dr Dave,

I’m using the version I updated yesterday. I’ve made a few changes which you can find in this file:

http://www.abcseo.com/papers/referrer-karma.zip

I copied the get_content function and changed it to check_content. This exits true the second it finds a referrer document with the site url otherwise it exits false. Perhaps more controversially I also reduced the referrer document size to check. This seems to work for me but let me know if I missed something. I’m currently testing on one of my sites.

I really appreciate your efforts in the fight against spam.

WordPress Plugin Request: referrer to trackback

I am not sure if this is possible at all – but would it not be nice to have a (spam safe) way of converting incoming referrer-URLs to trackbacks/pingbacks? So you know when a blog post has been linked to on del.icio.us or so.

Make it talk to SpamKarma…

AH nevermind, I didn’t realize the white list was dynamic..its kicking in now. This is SWEET.

Ok, I have installed SK2, works very well. Great plugin. Now I have just completed installing the RK plugin but I get the following error

Can’t select from Spam Karma blacklist
SQL Error: Table ‘xxxx_wordpress.blacklist’ doesn’t exist

what went wrong?

Thanks for the info Dave, I look forward to the RK2 update.

RK has been running for nearly a week, and is doing a pretty good job..but what I notice is, when a new domain refers, lots of entries will make it to my logs before RK “kicks in”. For example, my logs show 194 hits today from “brisbeck.com”, and RK’s w/b list shows 164 attempts. Is this normal?

[...] [...]

Apologies for that empty trackback above (pre-posting about Referrer Karma as I’m about to go on holiday).

I do have a question, and it might be that I don’t quite understand how this works.

I’m still seeing referrer spam in my stats (Extreme tracking). Now for the referrer spam to show up there my index.php will have had to be loaded. That suggests to me that Referrer Karma is missing those referrer spam and allowing them through to my site. Correct? If it was working they’d get a 403 and never get through to my site to load my stats script (and generate the refer).

Without the referrer in question showing up in the referrer karma logs how can I ensure it’s blacklisted?? Or does this mean that that particular spammer has figured a way around your code???

[...] Referer Karma. [...]

[...] I am now whooping and dancing around with glee everytime i see another bad referrer hit the Referrer Kama log, it’s really made my day. Now we just have to sit and wait for the next line of blog spammer attacks, most probably trackback spam and RSS Spam (which is already starting to hit Technorati results) The following posts may be relevant to this one: | Referrers | [...]

Referrer Karma seems to be working

Referrer Karma is a little “plugin” for blogs of many flavors. The design is simple, usage requires including a file at the top of your main index page or any other page designed to take comments and adding the check_referrer() function to…

[...] And, if you’re running any PHP website (including WordPress), run – don’t walk – and install Spam Karma’s cousin: Referrer Karma. It works on any PHP-based website, and can share the blacklist with Spam Karma 2 for a nice integrated spamroach killing machine. [...]

Dr. Dave,
I would like to add a live rk log to my site. Is there an easy way to do this?
Thanks.

Dave: Good deal.

I cringe at adding to your workload, but … there’s really no way to know, other than checking this page from time to time, that RK has been updated. Is there any hope, in a future version, of a check-back-to-home-base function that’ll alert the user that there’s a new version of RK to be rolled out?

Geoff: indeed, this could be a useful feature… Though RK is meant to be as lightweight as possible, and this wouldn’t really help on that stand. But when I get a sec, I’ll try to take care of something. In the meantime, RK isn’t a very intensive project, so hopefully updates should be few and between. Check a few weeks after each major release (like 2.0) and you should be fine.

Dave: I noticed that bug too before and didn’t have time to fix it. Finally did. Just download the newer version (2.2) and it should be fine now… Thanks for reporting….

Cheers everybody

A note about upgrading:

When you install a new version of WordPress, if you replace your index.php file, you’ll have to re-insert the lines to include ref-karma and call the check_referer function.

Suggesion:

This could be fixed by making ref-karma into an actual plugin. Add the WordPress plugin comments at the top of the file, and then put this somewhere:

add_action(‘plugins_loaded’, ‘check_referer’);

[...] Phew… fingers crossed a combination of bad behaviour and referrer karma has taken the meat out if the extra 10-15k page views incsub was getting every day and bandwidth looks like it’s back to normal. [...]

[...] Returning to my original plugin request above, while I found mostly negativity in the WP forum (excluding this comment), I also posted to the HostDime.com forum. There a terrifically helpful member, Dawzz, did some research on my behalf and replied: Hi Richard,I ran across Referrer Karma and it seems that it is what you need. You can look at refferers at anytime and decide if you want to block them or not take a look and if it isn’t what you need let me know or if you need any help, I am pretty decent with’hacking’ together php scripts. I sitll intend to do a test install and figure out what is going on with the code I had posted but I thought you might want to take a look at this. [...]

I just installed Ref Karma, but I don’t think it’s working. I tried entering the site from several links, but nothing shows up in the logs. Then I tried accessing via Wanna Browser with random referrers, and nothing. I followed the instructions. The configure option in settings is set to false. The admin screen indicates that everything is there and in order. I also included the tag at the top of every page. I’ve double checked, etc. Could this be a permissions thing or related to the database?

Here’s how I solved my installation problem. The most important thing is that I had to add the required line to the top of my index.php using Notepad NOT Wordpad. For some reason, Wordpad didn’t like the change I was making and kept automatically removing the line that I added. I tried several different ways of adding the line, thinking I’d get it right, but eventually I used Notepad instead and fixed the problem.

There are a couple other minor things:

- I realized I was editing my template files, not the index.php (that was a dumb mistake)

- For some reason, I was having trouble reaching the Admin screen with the provided link. When I removed the asteriks around the password, then I was able to get to my admin screen with no trouble. I’m not recommending this unless you have a similar problem though.

I’m having a problem using referrer-karma.php?rk_redirect_to=&rk_ban_this_ip=1

It says that it could not select from the Spam Karma blacklist. I take it that this is because I do not use Spam Karma. Is Spam Karma required to use this feature?

I’m confused. I don’t see a blacklist file. If you don’t share the SK blacklist file, where *is* there a blacklist file?

Thanks?

Thanks, but where or how do I find or access that table?

I installed ref_karma in wp-contents as suggested. Would I be able to see this if I installed it in “wp-contents//plugins”?

Whoops, the narrow column made that really hard to read. The URI is:

/path/to/referrer-karma.php?ref-karma-setup=true&pwd=your_secret_password

[...] This should be the first thing you do to prevent spam. I have found two very effective plugins which do the job very well. One is Bad Behavior and the other is Referrer Karma. I am currently using Bad Behavior on my blog. Optionally, you can add my Bad Behavior Stats Plugin to display the number of blocked attempts on your blog. [...]

[...] And finally, I have installed Dr. Dave’s plugin Referrer Karma. I know, I know, I said I didn’t have any comment plugins, but I don’t. Referrer Karma is a referrer spam plugin which just happens to work like my .htaccess file (but much more elegantly) to block the bad guys at the gates. [...]

[...] Posted on Monday 24 October 2005 so i’m checking out a new plugin for wordpress- Dr. Dave Referrer Karma. It may cause a little damage. so if you happen to hear (or see) that my URL is getting you redirected to a 403 error page, please let me know (my email is found in the “about page.” I realize this is semi-recursive request (let me know if you can’t get to my site from a site), but the amount of spam i’ve been getting is bizarre, given that I’m not exactly Instapundit, and I’m sick of deleting it. so, there ya have it. I’m working on the whitelist for referring sites I’m currently linked to. [...]

Okay, I keep getting “message_die() was called multiple times” errors from phpBB when certain pages refer hits to the board (I don’t know why only some pages do this and not others).

I have temporarily disabled Ref. Karma on my phpBB board until someone with my skill than I takes a look at this.

[...] Sad to say, but it had to happen. Referrer spam picked back up and I had to re-install referrer karma. [...]

To followup on my own comment, here’s more strangeness: looking at the Referrer Karma log, I see the sites listed above as blocked, and I even see some blocked attempts, but somehow other attempts from the same site are getting thru.

[...] Just a quick post to say a public thank you to the unknown genius who came up with the greatest WordPress plugins I have ever used. I am talking about Spam Karma and Refer Karma. [...]

[...] So if anyone, besides Rachael, read the techincal part of my last post, you know that I am trying to reduce the amount of referrer traffic, etc. to my site. Well, it looks like Referrer Karma works! I was about to goto bed tonight, when I checked my wp-shortstat page. Low and behold, the number of unknown referrers was way down! [...]

I just had to stop by and say thank you! Referrer Karma is a webmaster’s dream, especially if it’s a popular website that attracts a lot of referrer spammers.

So far, in less than a month, it has already blocked nearly 20,000 spam attempts and I haven’t noticed any adverse affects on the speed/functionality of my website .

Truly a work of art.

[...] Referrer Karma [...]

[...] Dr Dave, the guy who gave us Spam Karma 2, has gone one step further and produced Referrer Karma, a PHP script which sends dubious referrers to a 403 error page. While SK2 blocks comments, you still get get spam referrers in your WordPress logs. RK takes care of them. I installed it a few hours ago and am already seeing cleaner reports of ShortStat, Mint, and StatTraq. Get it here. [...]

[...] So, I settled on and installed Referrer Karma. After the painless installation (it’s not anywhere near one-click, you do have be careful and edit a file), I tested it by using one of the baddie referrers and tricking my Firefox browser to spoof the referrer, and … success! It blocked my access. Then I went to couple of my buddy-bloggers who link to me and tried to click-through and enjoyed more success. Checking the RK logfiles showed what happened: the bad referrers were added to a blacklist, and the good ones added to a whitelist. [...]

Tatum:

RK will only be effective if correctly called. I have no idea how exactly wp-cache works, but if, as one may suspect, it presents a static HTML file to visitors instead of the dynamic PHP page containing the call to RK, then obviously RK will never be triggered.
You should ensure the call to RK comes first before anything on whichever page is your main index page.

Cheers

Hi,
I’m unable to complete step three:
Browse to referrer-karma.php?ref-karma-setup=true (after prefixing the correct path to the file on your server, of course). And make sure all the checks are successful.

I complete steps one and two, but if you to
http://www.atennisblog.com/wp-content/referrer-karma.php
you will see that nothing comes up on this page.

Any help?
Thanks!!!

Referrer Karma is working perfectly on my site, but I don’t know how to see the statistics. Browsing referrer-karma.php only gives me a white page… am I doing something wrong?

Keep getting the following error:

Please edit referrer-karma.php and change $can_configure to ‘false’

Everything else on the page is blank, and I only see this line.

BTW – I have changed the config file to false, so I’m not sure why I am getting this error.

[...] Dr Dave Referrer Karma Referrer Karma is a rather simple script that prevents malicious bots from … Ensure that $can_configure is set to true (it sets Referrer Karma into … [...]

Does RK provide a way to “alias” (for lack of a better term) domains?

I have a number of pages and images on my sites that were formerly on other sites. Old links are handled via 301 redirects on the original sites. The problem this is that hits from pages that still contain the old URLs will be caught by RK due to the current domain not being found on the referring page. I’d like to be able to tell RK that referring pages that don’t contain links to the current domain, but do have a link to these other domains, are ok and should be allowed. Basically “aliasing” other domains to the current one.

I’ve added all domains I control to my whitelist, but most of these problem links are on sites that I don’t control.

Thanks, and keep up the good work.

[...] Finally, I use plugins called Referrer Karma and Bad Behaviour which help significantly by stopping bots from accessing your site to leave comment spam. [...]

[...] This should be the first thing you do to prevent spam. I have found two very effective plugins which do the job very well. One is Bad Behavior and the other is Referrer Karma. I am currently using Bad Behavior on my blog. Optionally, you can add my Bad Behavior Stats Plugin to display the number of blocked attempts on your blog. [...]

[...] filed under : computer | created around lunchtime – it was 1:29 pm to be exact | trackback | rss| [...]

[...] Referrer Karma (not exactly a plugin) [...]

[...] I’ve just installed Spam Karma 2 and Referrer Karma on canspice.org. You all shouldn’t notice anything different, but if you have problems leaving comments, let me know. previous entry next entry [...]

[...] 5、防Spam插件Bad Behavior：我发现在WordPress论坛上只要有类似你最不可缺少的WordPress插件这样的问题，基本上答案都是anti-spam类的插件，其中Spam Karma与Referrer Karma是最受欢迎的两个插件，不过我比较幸运，一直没有遇到horse那么多的垃圾留言，只是在最近才刚刚装上新出来的插件Bad Behavior，因为这个插件是通过识别spambot来阻止spam的，与一般常用的过滤的方式有所区别，所以安装来试试。 [...]

[...] 　厳密にはWordPressのプラグインではないのですが、有用なWordPressプラグインを数多く世に送り出しているデイヴ氏が作成された「Referrer Karma」を、先ほどこのブログに導入してみました。 [...]

[...] Unknown Genius: Referrer Karma [...]

[...] Referrer Karma to my anti-spam arsenal as well as the stats plugin so everyone can see what’s getting [...]