Thursday, November 20, 2008

FEEDJIT Wierdness

I installed FEEDJIT's live traffic feed -- rather than a map, it's a list of recent visitors, showing what country they're from and what web site they came from -- on my other blog. It gets like zero traffic so far as I can tell, and I was curious to see if anyone was lurking.

I've only gotten three legitimate comments the whole time I've had the thing. I'll admit I don't update it all that often, and pretty much everything that's there is also here (the idea being that readers who weren't interested in the writing craft/industry posts could just watch that one for releases and such) so I wasn't particularly expecting to see a bunch of lurkers reading today. (Although it'll be interesting to see if anyone shows up next time I do post something.)

What I do get a lot of, though, is comment spam. I probably delete at least a dozen a day, sometimes twenty or so. Wordpress has a good filter so they hardly ever get past the Possible Spam Please Moderate queue, but they do show up, and sure enough I've had a few this morning.

When I checked the FEEDJIT list, though, the only hits that showed were my own. o_O So... how am I getting all this comment spam if the spammers aren't actually hitting the site?? Anyone have any ideas?

Angie

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Robots.

Heh. That sounds all sinister and Sci-Fi---"Robots are trying to communicate with you!" I don't understand the particulars, but search engines crawl all over sites without registering as hits, so I'd imagine spammers use a similar system, fully automated so they're free to pursue their other interests, like making crank phone calls.

*waves from somewhere in Florida far, far away from my Feedjit dot*

Angie said...

Kerry -- ahh, that makes some sense. [nod] It's still incredibly annoying, mind you, but at least it's a reasonable explanation. :P Thanks.

Angie, getting out a can of Raid

Charles Gramlich said...

I don't know tech stuff

Angie said...

Charles -- thanks anyway. I have to keep reminding myself that I don't anymore; I used to be pretty good at this sort of thing before I got married, but having a pro around who can just zip-zip handle whatever has set me way back. I did most things for myself, back in the DOS days, but I'm just a reasonably intelligent but not overly knowledgeable user now that we're however many generations into Windows. :/

Angie

Stewart Sternberg (half of L.P. Styles) said...

I think it is fascinating to ocassionally see where people are coming from, what referrals they are using, or what search terms they used. On my blog, I've noticed Weird Addictions brought several people my way. Other searches include Morrow Road and hauntings. And then for some idiotic reason, a bunch of people were visiting, following the search terms Eldridge Cleavers Pants. I still have no clue.

Angie said...

Stewart -- heh. I don't have that info on my other blog, but I can look that sort of info up for this one and yeah, it gets pretty o_O at times. A dismaying number of people show up here looking for "dirty angie." [raised eyebrow] They land on my "Thinking Dirty Thoughts..." post about the post office, from when they lost my royalty statement back in January. Most likely not what they were looking for. [cough]

Angie