Most of the time they're not even really linking to you. They're just sending requests with forged referals. You can block their IPs with .htaccess, but they change so often that it doesn't do much good. b2evolution runs referers through the blacklist check before recording the stats, so keep it updated and ban bad referers just like you do with comments. Other programs for tracking stats may have their own methods of weeding out fake stats.

If you check out the demo of the new version of b2evolution (demo.b2evolution.net) you can look in the settings tab and see an interesting new feature. You can require that the refering page is actually scanned to see if it contains a real link to your site before the stat is recorded. There's a performance cost, but it would cut out almost all referal spam.

Thanks, personman! (And who came up with you? I always flash on the TMBG song)

Idea: [URL=http://underscorebleach.net/jotsheet/2005/01/referrer-spam-proposal]This link[/URL] talks about adding rel="no follow" to links on a page, and then that negates the purpose by causing search engines not to credit that link to the offending sites' page rank. Shouldn't be a hard hack to write for b2evo...but even that's only a partial solution.

What about simply having the stats, recent referrers, etc only show up on the page when I'm in admin mode? I'm sure readers shouldn't care much about that info anyway, but I like having it "on tap" when I'm on my own blog.

EDIT: Well, there's the manual right there: http://b2evolution.net/man/2004/12/29/control_referer_spam_howto ! Sometimes it's just a matter of knowing what it's called...

AND AGAIN: Since the same data is available in my back office anyway, I just commented it out for now. I cut/pasted all the admin-type info into one block and added /* ...*/ around it.

Well, it seems my blog got famous for a while, there. I had a lot of searches coming in where somebody just Googled "/b2evo/index.php?disp=stats". I tried it, and was agonized to discover that my site pops up #9 for that search term! So I went to my /b2evo/skins/chosen_skin/_stats.php page and deleted the line

 "require get_path('skins').'/_stats.php';"

so now they're looking at a blank page. Since I already deleted the link from my blog page to view stats, I now know that everybody hitting that page is a spammer. Any ideas for what to put there instead? :>