Tuesday, 13 December 2005
Spam, Splogs, Sprefs 
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What's a "splog"? Don't know? spam + blog = splog.
But what about "sprefs"? (freshly coined, yes) I haven't seen anyone talking about sprefs, despite seeing a lot of chatter about splogs, comment spam, wiki spam, and such. Here is an example of what I'm caling a "spref":
218.22.246.34 - - [13/Dec/2005:03:11:21 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 44403 "http://bontril.threethreethree.us/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC; AtHome021)
The geekier portion of the readership will recognize this is a line from the web server log file. See that bolded URL? That's "spref", a fake referer [sic] that is supposed to make you think that somebody from that page came to your site, and intrigue you enough that you go and visit that page. Of course, this referral is completely artificial, there is really no link to your site on that page, and you end up at some v1@gr@ site. So now we have: spam + refer(r)er = spref.
