Advanced .htaccess Security – Block Unwanted Referrers
For some bloggers and web developers, Digg can be a huge boost in traffic and thus a huge bust in ad revenue. Unfortunately, the Digg Effect can kill a website's bandwidth and get the website shut down. Wouldn't it be great if a weary web developer could prevent his site from being shut down by blocking users referred by Digg, at least a while? Using a small bit of .htaccess code and mod_rewrite, the developer can do just that.
The Code
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
Say good-bye to Digg Death with this small, easy-to-place snippet of code!
![Camera and Video Control with HTML5]()
Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs. Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop. One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...
![5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About]()
CSS and JavaScript: the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release. They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely. We have our .js files and our .css, but...
![CSS calc]()
CSS is a complete conundrum; we all appreciate CSS because of its simplicity but always yearn for the language to do just a bit more. CSS has evolved to accommodate placeholders, animations, and even click events. One problem we always thought...
![CSS Vertical Center with Flexbox]()
I'm 31 years old and feel like I've been in the web development game for centuries. We knew forever that layouts in CSS were a nightmare and we all considered flexbox our savior. Whether it turns out that way remains to be seen but flexbox does easily...
David,
I have a quick question for ya… can you make this .htaccess so you can transfer them to a “slimmed” down version of the same page or simply a blank page that says sorry digg users the site is offline for awhile?
One more question. When digg or any other site goes down for scheduled maintenance do they use this method to redirect all pages to a sorry we are down page?
Mark
Not a bad idea with your first question, Mark. Per your idea, I’d create a new sort of page template to do this. Say that “page.php” is getting hit hard and you want to show a slimmed down page. On page.php, you could check the referrer and if the referrer was digg, you could do a header() redirect to “slimpage.php?page=”.(yourpage). You’d them have slimpage.php provide a text-only version of your article.
As for a site being down, I’d bet that this is what they do. It’s very easy and very simple. Unfortunately, Digg, for example, doesn’t allow you to view their .htaccess file anymore.
What do you think abut blocking : “Options FollowSymLinks”, i think this is important also