There's email spam, IM spam, cell phone spam, blog comment spam, wiki spam, and yes, now I'm getting referer spam. For the non-HTTP gurus out there, the referer is a URL that web browsers send to let web sites know where a user came from. Putting together a list of referers can show a webmaster which sites are linking to his/her site.

Recently, my server log files have been filled with referers like www + some variation of easy money, play poker, refinance, or buy condos + .com. I can guarantee that those sites have no legitimate link to JoshChristie.com.

The only upshot to this new form of spam is that it shows the increasingly desperate measures spammers have been forced to go to. After all, how many people ever view a list of all the referers to a site? Referer spam is generally only going to reach the webmaster and webmasters, of all people, aren't naive enough to fall for spam tricks.

What could the next form of spam be? I honestly can't think of any medium that doesn't already suffer from it.

On a related note, MT-Blacklist is pretty reliably keeping hundreds of comment spams from being published on my site each day. What a waste of bandwidth, though.