Here is a list of some of the sites that awstats lists as referers. Aport is listed as a search engine with 10 hits from them and they aren't even a search engine. they are a parked page. I deleted the urls - didn't realize that they would be live links. These sites aren't linking to my site. What is happening? I've had the same thing happen a few times on other sites but I never have been able to find out why this happens.
You are now exactly giving them more of what they want. It's called referer spam and you now made live links so they benefit even more. As long as your logs are password or IP protected you don't have to worry about these bogus log entries.
It is not my decision to make these live links - Most forums when you post a url it doesn't make that url a link but apparently this forum does which doesn't make sense to me. I tried to chenge them so they weren't live links but on this forum you can't do that. I will delete the urls out of my post. I was just wondering what I could do about it.
Or wrap them with [plain][/plain] or [code][/code] - though I have witnessed Google even crawling plain text links. As far as your 'problem' is concerned - you can go to extreme lengths and block access to their IPs etc. but really yuo should just let it be. It's part and parcel of the web - just ignore it.
if it eats your bandwidth up then it DOES become a problem and then you should do something about it, but until then, just ignore it