Are unwanted referals verging on illegal

[mack]

At the begining of this month I posted about a problem I was having with my site. My site is a small search engine, web directory and I have been getting literaly hammered by an autosubmission service. The problem comes in the form of automatic submission software that is available for sale from the makers website. I have emailed them repeatedly asking to be removed but still no joy. In the past 22 days they have sent me in excess of 150 000 requests. Eventualy this is going to cost me quite a lot in terms of bandwidth.

I have asked them to stop. they havent stopped and havent even replied. Could what they are doing be termed as illegal?

[heini]

I would block them. Not sure about it being illegal or not, but looking at how the big guns handle this I suggest it's not. They just ban them.

[Mikkel Svendsen]

It is not so easy to ban them - but you can block most agent/robot entries to your submission form with random graphic image. Many online services use that today. Take a look at the free submission at Av as an example:

[addurl.altavista.com...]

[mack]

It is impossible to block , the user installs the software on their desktop pc and usues a dial-up or whatever to do the submissions. therefore no ip and no useragent.

so far I have moved the location of the script because it was getting to the stage where I was getting a 50 meg database of submissions every day.

I know I could use the image idea but I am still getting unwanted hits and unwanted bandwidth usage.