Will Richardson

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Referrer Madness

December 22, 2004 By Will Richardson

It used to be fun to check my Manila referrer logs on a regular basis because I always used to be able to find a link or two to sites or people that were writing about blogs or other tools in schools. Nowadays, however, it’s a nightmare. Aside from the long list of porn sites that are spamming the logs, now it looks like some potentially “reputable” businesses are showing up as well, like academyofmusic.us and slatersdvds.com and donnasrentacar.com. Of course, if you should click on one of these, you get, guess what? A porn site. Oy.

I think I get that this is all Google‘s fault since they rank their results by who has the most links on the Web. What I’m not sure I get is what possible benefit a porn spammer gets from using and address like donnasrentacar.com. The logic just escapes me but I’m sure there is some twisted reason. I’m sure that the Spam Hunter has some ideas.

This has been and continues to be the one aspect of all of this that we as educators using these tools need to get a handle on. And it is without question the biggest fear that most people bring up when we start talking about how to use them in the classroom. I think I’ve got Manila set up so that our student sites won’t get spam comments left on them by some bot. But I’m not sure how I can stop these links from showing up in their referrer logs. They haven’t yet, to my knowledge, probably because their sites aren’t on anyone’s radar. But we’ve got to find a way to make sure it never happens, because as we’ve already seen, some schools will look for reasons not to go down this path.

Filed Under: General, On My Mind

Comments

  1. PZ Myers says

    December 22, 2004 at 7:37 am

    Doesn’t Manila have a blacklist that extends to referrers? I’ve seen the same sites show up in my logs, once…but then they’re zapped when I add them to the blacklist.

    Alternatively, why do students even need to see referrers?

  2. YH Tan says

    December 22, 2004 at 8:48 am

    From an educator’s pt of view as well, perhaps while we grapple with these problems, we could at the same time use this opportunity to educate our students on net etiquette as such. To the very least, we can be sure that they will not be one of these “maroon”?

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