Referrer (or referer) spam has become a serious problem in the blogosphere. We need an intelligent way to eliminate this growing nuisance. I’ve thought about and researched this for the past few days, and below I offer a proposal for a technological so…

I figured I’d throw that information out there just in case, it would’ve come up at some point anyway

You seem to be loving the rel=”nofollow” attribute eh? I’ve got some rules in my user stylesheet (as per recommendation on Andy Budd) and I see them everywhere. I’d argue that reference links in your post should be OK to weigh in on a sites Page Rank, no?

Jimmy: I honestly don’t know the best way around. I’m supposing you’d have to query MT-Blacklist first, store that in an array and then loop through Shortstat using that as your criteria.

Justin: Fair point – my method above is a bit, er, clumsy at least. That said, subqueries in MySQL don’t work in versions less than 4.1 (my host runs 4.0) and so I was pretty much out of luck.

There are of course workarounds but as you may have guessed, my SQL query knowledge starts drawing a big brick wall when faced with that sort of thing!

Seems like a quite a resource intensive action to be executing against your DB. If you’re in a shared web hosting environment, your webhost might frown on CPU pegging.

I don’t know, maybe something like:

delete from si_shortstat where domain in (select ext_bl_item_text FROM mt_ext_bl_item)

Just a guess at first glance, I have no idea if that would work.