Apache Follow

If you are using multiple backend servers with Squid as a frontend or as a load balancer you may be interested in reducing the amount of bandwidth that is wasted by nefarious crawlers, bots and spambots. With a single server facing the internet you may be familiar with using .htaccess and mod_rewrite to provide similar functionality however if some of your backend servers are not running Apache or any other server that doesn't support mod_rewrite then you can use Squid in a similar fashion to block certain traffic before they reach your backend server. Since I implemented my solution I have seen the numbers of comment spam on my blog reduced from around 100 per day to between two and 10!