Have you been noticing an annoying referrer showing up in your referrals, with the address of www.starprose.com? I have too, and decided to dig into the site to see why it keeps showing up in my referrals, even though they haven’t referred to my site at all anywhere. It turns out they’re using a program called Referrer Advertising System (RAS), or more accurately, Referrer Spamming System. They go around and spam every site, hoping it’d show up in your referrer script, prompting you to visit whatever site they’ve set.

Quite bluntly, it is another really low, lame attempt, to spam people. It isn’t enough to stoop really low by spamming the comments of blogs, but now they go one small step further, and spam your referral script. It is an indication of just how desperate some people will get for an average of $.002 of a penny for each hit.

Spammers are becoming a lot like press relations managers for corrupt companies. They use semantics to fool people into thinking that what they’re doing is okay. StarProse’s motto is, “Driving the Future of Information”, but it should more realistically reflect what they’re really doing, which is “Driving the Future of Spammers.” It’s sad, really.

Thankfully, there’s a spot in the referral script I use that allows me to block certain sites, IP’s, and so on. Time for me to use it. Be sure to add StarProse to your list as well.