I -have- read about 4 hours worth of forum postings (@donncha sent me, can't let him down!) but I still haven't unraveled the answer I need. I'm getting >3,200 useless hits a day.
Here's what's happening and what I'd like to happen instead.
An old 'bells & whistles' site was set up by a former webmaster of ours. It still hosts a personal site of his. It included automated affiliate marketing, etc. It is STILL hitting the new site on our new host, showing a phantom directory, like this:
example.com/phantom-dir/?~150-chars-of-affiliate-mumbo-jumbo
The affiliate links (all books) are actually related to the new content at the new location.
I'd like to redirect all 3,200 of those hits to example.com/index.php.
After hitting it with a deny/403, it occurred to me that those hits might be more useful if redirected to our home page.
But how do you redirect hits on a directory that does not exist?
His ISP, e-mailed two weeks ago, has yet to respond. We are looking at ~50k hits and counting.
OTOH, if someone reading this happens to be that webmaster ... if this looks vaguely familiar ... PM me and I'll give you the URL to cut the life support on.
