intertwingly

Sam, am I just being an idiot here? Digg feels like one massive troll to me.

As for reddit, I got negative feedback on the original parallels post there too but it was at least reasoned and constructive.

Anyway, if you can expand on this, I’d appreciate it. I’ve heard from at least one person who I respect a great deal that thinks I’m just being stupid. Is varying on referer crossing a line?

Is varying on referer crossing a line?

I went to my doctor and told him “my penis is burning.” He said, “That means somebody is talking about it.” (Garry Shandling)

Anyway... there’s nothing wrong with varying on referrer, except, you know, you’re breaking the web, etc.  But despite what the purists may claim, not all links are created equal.  Some links suck, and they create more trouble than they’re worth, and ultimately it’s your site and you can do whatever you like.  (For example, I hide my comment form from daringfireball.net readers.)

But in the long run, your tactic is unlikely to solve anything, because (a) if trolls are determined to link to you, they’ll find a way (there are lots of META-refresh-based anonymous redirect services available which don’t pass on any information about the original referrer — Google runs one, fer chrisakes), and (b) it won’t help educate the general public about what you see as the problem (most Diggers are trolls).

A more au-currant approach might be a parody of those stupid little “Digg this!” links that says “Don’t Digg this!” and points to your “403” post or some other explanation of why you feel Digg isn’t worth the hassle.  You can’t educate trolls; you can wait for them to grow up or you can ignore them.  The best you can do is educate everyone except the trolls, and your current approach doesn’t accomplish this.

ultimately it’s your site and you can do whatever you like

+1

I’ve employed similar techniques (generally at the Apache level, however) from time to time.  For example, my stats pages in particular seem to attract a lot of referrer spam, so they can only be reached from links from within my site.  These pages are also are blocked in my robots.txt.

And as for my philosophy on serving one’s audience, see this post.

Thanks guys.

Mark: as for the questionable effectiveness of the referrer blocking, my main concern is ensuring no article ever comes near the Digg front page. That seems to be what leads to the kind of traffic I’m trying to avoid. If the 403 hits even 50% of the time, it should be enough to cause a bunch of people to bury or Digg down or otherwise vote against me.

Feedback from digg people on HTML5....