Romeo - 5:55 pm on Nov 13, 2007 (gmt 0)

wouldn’t the entry still appear in the log file, but just with different status code returned?

If you block with .htaccess rules, yes, you are right, the logs get polluted with that referrer spam, regardless if it comes with 200 or 403 status codes.

A better medicine would be grounding their IP addresses in the firewall, so the web server woulndn't see them at all.
That, however, prevents from seeing what is going on.

So, I let my webservers send them a 403, watch their tail through the logs, and later cut them out with a grep -v before processing the statistics.

This thread isn't dead yet ...

Kind regards,
R.