Of all the animals of prey, man is the only sociable one.
Every one of us preys upon his neighbour, and yet we herd together.
The Beggar's Opera: John Gay

Friday 5 August 2011

Get lost, Ivan!

I've wasted more time than I care to think of checking on Blogger's handy stats page, which is how I first noticed the phantom hordes.

Things have calmed down since then but I'm beginning to get a clearer picture. I suspect that the unwary blogger clicking on any of the links to the dozens of phantom referring URLs to see where his visitors came from might be in for something of a shock.

The give-away is that they are somehow bypassing statcounter, which is rather more informative on visitors' locations and IP addresses, suggesting a desire for anonymity in keeping with their presumed content. I'm reminded of John O'Farrell's excellent description of surfing the net as being rather like the sort of surfing you do in North Cornwall:
'You spent a fortune on equipment, you spent ages just waiting around and occasionally something really disgusting popped up to the surface.'
The latest phantom to crash the system doesn't even try to hide behind an innocuous front; if the URL is to believed, a substantial amount of traffic is heading my way from a Russian site of an 'adult' nature.

Now it's nice that people want to drop in and read my various ramblings - and I'm always pleased to see the Tavern regulars - but I can't help thinking that there's little here to entertain a bunch of horny Russians, so on the whole I'd prefer it if they just left me alone.

And, incidentally, if you are the reader who recently turned up looking for pictures of Hallowe'en tattoos while logged onto the server at the 'Ukrainian State Nuclear Generating Facility' - please stop reading blogs and get back to work NOW!

1 comment:

  1. I've had some Russian visitors according to Blogger, but Google Analytics ignores them.

    ReplyDelete

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