Stats and Spam


When I commented on my January stats I said

Looking at my web stats, it appears that last month I had almost 100,000 visits (97,571) from almost 20,000 distinct IPs (19,484) averaging almost 10,000 hits/day (9,801).

In February I had a slight decrease in visits (93,441) from slightly more distinct IPs (19,528) and broke 10,000 hits/day (10,826).

However, I have very mixed feelings about March: 129,719 visits and 17,265 hits/day. I should be delighted (a 60% increase in hits month-over-month!) but I can't help but think most of the increase is meaningless (and possibly malicious).

Especially when I had 10,980 hits from just one IP address (80.77.80.46) in March accessing two blog entries repeatedly.

Certainly the tripling of the number of bytes served from the start of the year until I added the maths CAPTCHA is directly attributable to comment spam.

But there also seems to be a relationship between which web pages got hit with comment spam and which are now getting accessed disproportionately by the same IP addresses over and over again.

The original post was in the categories: this_site spam but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.