A Plugin to bounce back referrer spam attempts; requires no upfront configuration, no mod-rewrite. It is like the strong silent bouncer at your favorite club. Tested on all versions of WordPress.
It does one job and does it well. Enough said.
We were trying to block referrer spammer???s from our blog sites. We saw few scripts, never a real WordPress Plugin which does the job without requiring you to configure anything or without requiring manual modification of core files. Also we want to manage the list of referrer domains without having to modify the source code. We were uncomfortable with Plugins, which requires modification of core WordPress code, because it forces you through painful upgrade procedures.
So we created Referrer Bouncer Plugin for WordPress 1.5x with the following simple requirements:
Referrer Bouncer Plugin is of the class of upload-activate-and-forget Plugins (like WordPress 1.5 Plugin to disable nofollow from comments), Plugins that simply work.
Note: If you find this plugin useful, please consider contributing to ensure development of more such plugins and maintenance.
The Plugin doesn???t require any manual configuration to operate as it comes pre-configured with known list of referrer domains and sub-domains.
However if you feel that you still need to add/modify additional domains/sub-domains/words etc. you can do so from the links provided in the Plugin page. It documents all the procedure with appropriate links. Remember to first create the referer.txt file.
Notes:
You can specify your own domains, sub-domains in the list. You can also specify single words like poker. We advise against it because it would exclude valid referrer???s who may have poker as part of the URL like https://blog.example.com/why-poker-is-bad.
Do not leave any empty line in the file or empty spaces anywhere. We do not trim and do not check for empty lines because we just want the Plugin to be as fast as possible.Referrer Bouncer Plugin
This disables the Plugin. You can also delete the noreferer.php file from wp-content/plugins directory and referer.txt (if created) from the wp-content directory for permanent removal.
Update: This plugin may not work effectively with wp-cache as it doesn???t allow any plugins to execute if caching is enabled, except for the first time. If you want to use wp-cache then you should use .htaccess to block your referrer spammers. However be very careful as you can very easily create site-wide problems. Be sure to test very very well if you decide to go .htaccess way.