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!
![An Interview with Eric Meyer]()
Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it?
At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...
![Vibration API]()
Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user. One of those simple APIs the Vibration API. The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...
![Spatial Navigation]()
Spatial navigation is the ability to navigate to focusable elements based on their position in a given space. Spatial navigation is a must when your site or app must respond to arrow keys, a perfect example being a television with directional pad remote. Firefox OS TV apps are simply...
![Using jQuery and MooTools Together]()
There's yet another reason to master more than one JavaScript library: you can use some of them together! Since MooTools is prototype-based and jQuery is not, jQuery and MooTools may be used together on the same page.
The XHTML and JavaScript
jQuery is namespaced so the...
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