kris sent me an extension for the backlinks-macro (which was born in this thread) and i implemented it, so the backlinks-macro has two new optional attributes:

<% story.backlinks limit="10" exclude="google,search,hotbot" %>

limit does what the name says. the upper limit which cannot be overridden is 100 backlinks (i don't think more makes sense anyway).

exclude must be a comma-delimited list of strings. whenever one of the strings appears in a backlink it will not be displayed, meaning that "search" will not display backlinks from search.yahoo.com, www.search.com, and also not a referrer like www.google.com

because referrers are written asynchronously to the database the whole backlinks-list is now also cached for about 1 minute (it will be re-rendered after scheduler did his job of writing the referrers).

the change is currently only in cvs and not implemented here at antville.org. please give it a try and tell me what you think about it. and thanks for the contribution, kris!