well podz, somehow I am not surprised that you would challenge me (of all people) with that question 🙂
In a nutshell : spammers are evil” is ALL it takes for me.
However, there are more practical reasons for fighting referer spam:
1. not everyone has 40GB of bandwith to spare a month. I do, but not everyone does. I know of people that have seen their month’s allotment of bw desimated by spammers. The pages that have been called on my site are believe or not about 40kB in size each, after you tack on images and what not. Thats a hefty chunk when it happens repeatedly. Ive seen, I think, 5 of these hits in 1.5 days– so lets use these numbers (and I think is a low estimate) :
15 days at one hit = 585MB
15 days at two hits = just over 1GB
1.5 GB of bw wasted on spam in a month, and thats just referer spam, that doesnt account for any other mishaps that might get through.
2. Many people watch their logs for other reasons than to battle spam. I, for instance, like to know where my traffic comes from, what pages people are looking at, etc.. Bogus referers clutter logs, and make me have to work — check the referer, is it real, is it fake?
3. “If referer spam is not seen to harm our blogs, then why should we be bothered ?” Is this a question, or an assumption, or a statement? It’s clearly arguable that ALL types of spam hurts ALL web sites, not just blogs.
I believe that any concerted and continued effort that web masters make to thwart spammers is not only good for themselves, its good for other web masters as well. We are symbiotic in that regard.
4. Lastly all spam is evil. And I like the idea of battling scourge. It’s also a rather rewarding endeavor when you win.
