Referrer spam and bandwidth

stop referrer spam from eating into my bandwidth

[badtigger]

I was wondering if one puts a SetEnvIfNoCase in their htaccess file to bloack referrer spam like so:

SetEnvIfNoCase X-AAAAAAAAAAAA 1 spammer=yes
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer badguy.com spammer=yes
deny from env=spammer

it will redirect them to a 403, but, will it still result in the spammer eating into my bandwidth?

Is there anyway to stop referrer spam from eating into my bandwidth?

[jdMorgan]

You could block them by IP address at the firewall, or rewrite the request to a subdirectory containing a custom 403 errordocument page of zero bytes.

The first solution is the only one that will result in no load on your server, while the second option at least minimizes wasted bytes (although a short response containing only the server response headers is still sent).

Jim