This is a collection of frequently asked questions about ReferrerCop. Feel free to edit this page.

You can just add plain old domain names to the list, one per line, and it’ll work fine. Like so:

evilspammer.com
anotherspammer.com
naughtyspammer.com

You can also use regular expressions if you want, but they’re not necessary:

(?:evil|another|naughty)spammer.com

The complex tangle of regular expressions that make up the default blacklist is just a more efficient way of blocking a large number of domains, since a small number of complex regular expressions results in more efficient matching than a large list of domain names.

Yep. Just add the URL in the following format:

example.com/foo/bar.html

Partial URLs will also work:

example.com/foo

The first example will only match referrers from http://example.com/foo/bar.html, while the second will match any referrer beginning with http://example.com/foo.

I manually update and verify the list based on referrer spam received by various sites I administer, as well as those hosted by Jetpants. The spamming domains and URLs are first entered into a plain text file and then compiled by a custom program into a highly optimized set of complex regular expressions, which are what you see in the default blacklist file.

Not unless you have root access or you wish to run your own stats software. You could ask your administrator to run Referrercop on your logs in /usr/local/apache/domlogs/ (Path may vary between OS‘s) via a cron