Hi Donald,
I think I should mention to you that the solution that you are applying to GA are not really solving the traffic spam problem. Rather, all that you are doing is hiding the spam data. After applying the solution, the spamming will continue to happen except that now you wouldn't see it anymore. It works great for (Google) ghost spam but there are many more types of web traffic spam that you will happily ignore thinking that all is fine now...
Thanks Carlos for mentioning MB (malleablebyte.org). We are a bunch of researchers trying to really solve the web traffic spam problem. Referral spam is merely a subset of web traffic spam. Web traffic spam is evolving and in some instances botnets are used to do web traffic spamming but these data doesn't really show up on your GA. They look like human visitors but are really bots either harvesting data from your site or making money with referral spamming.
Our hope is to bring awareness to this problem and help people avoid the false impression that the current techniques are adequately solving the problem. MB is our effort to collect data for research and experiment with possible solutions. MB is more advanced than mere filters, it includes machine learning and predictive algorithms that we hope can make a real difference.
