Use $HTTP_REFERER to block access

Jerr

I've been getting annoying hits on my website from porn and other non-related sites attacking mine. I want to forbid them from portions of my site using PHP's HTTP_REFERER var to give them a 403 error. Any way to do so? I have a header file already. I was hoping for using preg_match or something like that to look for sex, rape, etc. Any ideas?

Mordecai

Well, there is no $HTTP_REFERER, but there is $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. You could use a set of conditionals, or a regular expression.

For an example of conditionals, you could try:

if ((strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'sex0r') === FALSE) &&
    (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], 'pr0n') === FALSE)) {
  /* it's a clean referer */
}

Pretty easy to adapt.

Although, make sure you don't just rely on referrer--it's often not set.

Jerr

But how would you give them a 403 Forbidden error code?

sidney

you can send a header 403

http://uk.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

header("HTTP/1.0 403 Access forbiden");