Upgrades and scumbags...

I spent a couple of hours tonight dealing with something I've been putting off for awhile: dealing with porn referrers in my Apache logs.

I took a slightly different tack than Paul, who set an Apache environment variable to "dontlog", then created a custom access_log without those entries.

Initially, I was going to just duplicate Mark Pilgrim's approach. I couldn't get the redirects to work, which seemed strange, until I realized I was running a fairly minimal Apache build that didn't have mod_rewrite. That would explain it.

I decided this was as good an opportunity as any to download Apache 2.0, and see what it's about. It's fairly straightforward, but I installed it in a new location so I could back out more easily, and then had to reconfigure all its defaults when it installed without a hitch. I quickly discovered that mod_rewrite only reduces the bandwidth being wasted on the porn spammers et al, so I turned to my Webalizer config file, where I added a number of Ignore lines, encompassing all the porn words I could think of (Oops - gotta add "lemurs"). Update: For the sake of accuracy, I actually used the "HideSite" directive in webalizer, so sites with porn words in their names won't show up on the stats page, but I will see the traffic they cause.

This sort of thing is one of the reasons I find TypePad attractive. Like a Krikkit warship at Lord's Cricket Ground, this sort of thing becomes Somebody Else's Problem.

Update: And, what the hell, I'll password my usage data. If you have any interest in my stats, e-mail me, and I'll send you the current username and ID.