Minor and possibly uninteresting tidbit
Our friends the Bulgarian referrer spammers have apparently figured out they’re being blocked. They’re clearly not sure why, so they’re experimenting.
What they’re experimenting with at the moment is breaking apart my tidy URLs and adding them as parameters after a question-mark, as in a typical search string or PHP-based URL.
It’s not working for them, but it’s a cute tactic. There’s probably a way to block based on it, but I’m too lazy to work it out, given that I derive no immediate benefit from it.
Correction: Nope, nope, nope, that’s not what’s happening. What’s actually happening is that the 301 redirect I’ve got for them sends back the PHP URL, which the bot tries to fetch, only now the referrer is my site, so the bot tries to 301 over to that, and so on and so forth. Cute. Almost honeypottish.
But I don’t really have the bandwidth to spare for these schmucks, so I’ve gone back to 403ing them. You may wish to do the same.