Friday, May 30, 2008

HTTP Codes for More Efficient Whining

Someone on Facebook posted an article by The Beijinger about a rock festival being cancelled by the Chinese government. I was entertained when I got a unique 403 by following the Facebook link:
We have identified that you have been refered here by a known or supposed spammer.

Yeah, something tells me they didn't work very hard on the supposing part. It also shows up when following it from my site.
If you are actually doing referer spam, please note that this website/b2evolution no longer records and publishes referers. Not even legitimate ones! While we understand it was fun for you guys while it lasted, please understand our servers cannot take the load of all this cumulated spam any longer... Thank you.

Seems like quite the over-emotional IT staff. Anyway, like the plea for attention said, publishing your referers enables link spam. So...don't. or use rel="nofollow" on your referral links. But don't abuse the 403 error codes to complain about how you had to disable spam.

3 comments:

Julie said...

Heya, are you still in Osaka?

Khakionion said...

Nope, today's my first day back in Arkansas, USA.

Unknown said...

Congratulations on your new job!