htaccess issue with denying ip range

I have a directory website, and 2 days ago I noticed 1,000's of submissions, which, to my knowledge is some sort of automatic submission software.
So I look at the logs to find that its from The Planet:

....however, I blocked the IP range for them:

that didnt work, so I did a whois for those hostnames, and found they have different ip's i.e 29.c6.7bae.static.theplanet.com = 208.187.80.135 ......

My question is this, why didn't blocking *.theplanet.com work?

As a temp measure, I had to use:

   if ($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] == "") {
      inl_header("http://www.spam.com");
      exit();
   }

PHP:

I know its a crude way but....

Any insights?

 

should be
deny from .theplanet.com
no *

for a range of ip's there is no space each side of the - in the middle.

 

well, that didn't work:

It redirects, as to my php code......