Block Domains & Subdomains Using .htaccess
A large focus of my redesign was improving site speed, and in doing so, I took a look at my site's error_log for the first time in a long time. I was shocked when I found out that 90% of my site errors were either hacking attempts or hot-linked files from hundreds of different tumblr.com subdomains. Thousands upon thousands of PHP fatal errors due to lack of memory saw me seeing red pretty quick -- no wonder I was having periodical speed issues! Luckily this bit of .htaccess code allows me block all of those sites:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^https?://([^.]+\.)*tumblr\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
</IfModule>
These days I only see PHP notices in my error_log, and that makes me a very happy man. I've also noticed less SPAM commenting, so maybe Tumblr is used a SPAM hub too? Either way, blocking domains and subdomains did the trick for me!
![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...
![Create a CSS Flipping Animation]()
CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...
![Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows]()
Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them. For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked. Just because we...
![HTML5 Context Menus]()
One of the hidden gems within the HTML5 spec is context menus. The HTML5 context menu spec allows developers to create custom context menus for given blocks within simple menu and menuitem elements. The menu information lives right within the page so...
There are 2 issues with your solution:
1) If a legit person linked to your blog from their Tumblr blog, people would see a Forbidden message. This is because you have your images under the same domain as the blog. Keeping them on the sub-domain would save your visitors from this.
2) Security – probably a minor issue, but when you get a Forbidden message from Apache, you also get a path to the content you were forbidden to access. And since you are using WordPress with caching, the message looks as follows:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /wp-content/w3tc/pgcache//block-domain/_index_search_engines.html_gzip on this server.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at davidwalsh.name Port 80
Thanks for sharing Shimon. Per your points:
1. If it’s only specific subdomains hurting you, listing them one by one would be best, I agree. In my case, I don’t care if legit Tumblr sites are linking to me. :)
2. I’ll look into the Forbidden issue — thanks!
Wow. blocking anyone comming from tumblr seems pretty extreme to me, you could at least add a RewriteCond to block only static content.
Seems like a lot of work, when this doesn’t even require mod_rewrite:
deny from .tumbler.com