not2easy - 3:54 am on Feb 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

Sorry I disguised the wrong part of the IP I quoted, lucy24 is only off by one number, it was 178, I just thought I should change a part of the IP to post it. I have blocked that IP and dozens of others as they appear.

I started to look into the code offered by wilderness, but wonder now if it would have the outcome I want because I don't believe that all these weird referrers are actual links to my site. There is no reason to believe that a student forum in India would have members whose profiles need to link to a website about fixing ceilings. An awful lot of "referers" are from forum profiles in Poland and Pakistan and hundreds more from domains with names that refer to jackets or jerseys or handbags or investing.

I had started by blocking referrers with more than 3 "referrals" since all of them come in only with the "GET / HTTP/1.0" and never request an actual page, but there are hundreds. It is referrer spam (why?) and will blocking all the .ru, .in, .pl, .pk referrers stop it or put a big dent in it? In that case I should opt for something like
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*\.(A-Z 0-9){2}/
to snag them all I think.