[spiffytech]

> 5. Instead of banning them, return fake content (fake titles and fake images etc) if proxy is detected OR the ip is flagged.

> 6. Don't ban the flagged ip's. She/He's gonna find another one. Make them angry and their user's angry so they give up on you.

There's a popular blog that no longer gets linked on HN.

The author didn't like the discussions HN had around his writing, so any visitors with HN as the referer are shown goatse, a notorious upsetting image, instead of the blog content.

[mschuster91]

Goatse? I assume you're referring to jwz - that blog shows a testicle in an egg cup if it sees a HN referrer.

[spiffytech]

Yeah, jwz. Looks like I got mixed up - goatse has been a popular choice for this kind of thing, but jwz went with a different image.

Fortunately, there are many upsetting images for the OP to choose from!

[GTP]

Out of curiosity, which blog are you talking about?

[ignoramous]

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jwz.org

[someweirdperson]

Does anyone not have their referer header supressed or faked?

[zhfliz]

I strip the referrer generally via https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer, unfortunately it breaks a small number of sites very badly, such as web.archive.org and a few others. some of them claiming it was done to combat scraping.

[someweirdperson]

Breaking is only part of the problem. The pages that rely on the referer header take it for granted and do not implement any meaningful error handling. They just die a horrible death, instead of responding with an error message stating that they need a referer.

One bad example is relying on the referer only for log-out, everything else works. That site also runs massive js on log-out, as if it really needs to rely on explicit log-out, and not just the user disappearing.

[heleninboodler]

I have never considered faking or suppressing my referer header. I don't know why I would care. I suspect I'm in the company of well over 99% of all internet users.