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!
![5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of]()
My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible. I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out. MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...
![Facebook Open Graph META Tags]()
It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites. Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly. And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website. One...
![iPhone Click Effect Using MooTools or jQuery]()
One thing I love about love about Safari on the iPhone is that Safari provides a darkened background effect when you click a link. It's the most subtle of details but just enforces than an action is taking place. So why not implement that...
![MooTools Zebra Table Plugin]()
I released my first MooTools class over a year ago. It was a really minimalistic approach to zebra tables and a great first class to write. I took some time to update and improve the class.
The XHTML
You may have as many tables as...
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