Here’s a new trick: “spamming” people’s web sites with false referrer information in order to get your porn site to show up on the site’s stats page.

This week I noticed that, all of a sudden, the “link from external page” section of my stats page had suddenly filled up with sites called things like antispamfilter.com and stopallspam.com. What does that have to do with porn? Well, nothing, really, except that the same client IP address left those referrers in my server log that left free-hardcore-sex-pictures and free-hardcore-porn-pictures, among others.

(Oh, for what it’s worth, according to whois, most of them seem to be located in Neutral Bay, Australia. If anyone reading this happens to be from Neutral Bay and knows Angus McKinnon or Russell Banks, tell them to knock it off.)

I know this site is fascinating, but I doubt it’s fascinating enough to entice some philanthropic porn / spam filter merchant to link to it, or to entice said merchant’s customers to click on said link several hundred times in the course of a couple of midnight hours. (Even if “whores” is consistently one of the most common search terms to turn up in the logs.)

What I can’t figure out is why anyone would go to the trouble. The stats page motivation is the only one I can think of, but I’m probably just biased because that’s how I noticed the phenomenon; I can’t see how that would actually drive enough traffic to a site to make it worth hacking. Any guesses?

Anyway, I’ve now stopped the stats page reporting referrer info, period. It was fun while it lasted.