As most people with their own web servers do, I run stats analysis packages over my logs to see which sites are most popular, which pages are getting hit the most, what browsers people use, and where people are clicking on links to my site — these specific stats are called the referrer (or “referer”, which stems from a typo in the old NCSA httpd software from ye olden days) stats, based on the HTTP_REFERER value passed by the web browser to the web server to say “hey, this guy clicked from this page to yours!”

This is great for tracking things like web searches to your pages, or seeing new trends in sites linking to you and so on. What someone somewhere has done is to create a bot or some other piece of software that just spams a site with invalid URLs (for me it’s /picsXXXXX-YY, where XXXXX and YY are a random set of numbers), and passes the same referrer value over and over again, usually for p0rn sites. This means my referrer stats are full of bloody adult site links, which pisses me off no end. I’ve modified my analysis config to compensate, but I really shouldn’t have to do this at all, it’s ridiculous.

This is likely the way the Web will continue to march in 2003 — all bow before pr0n referrer spam, cos I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.