SWTOR and Spam, Part II

After writing my last blog, I asked my husband if there was such a thing as someone selling blog URLs to spammers.  He replied, "Well, if there is a way to make money off of something, I'm sure someone is doing it."

The annoying thing, in addition to having to clean the spam out of my spam folder daily, is that it messes up my statistics.

In the last little while, for no apparent reason other than the possibility of spammers trying to find green pastures, my hit count on a couple of blog entries has skyrocketed.  If I thought people were actually benefiting from my writing, I wouldn't mind, but I know most of the hits are likely from people hoping to spam my comment section, which kind of invalidates the data.

There is a bright side to this, however . . . and it has to do with a silly little side hobby I have pertaining to my blogs:  I collect countries.

Every few days, I check my stats for hit counts, page accesses, and so forth, but what really excites me is the information about the audience.  In this section, I can get information on In my draft folder, I keep a record of the countries from which people have accessed this blog.

I find myself giggling in delight when I find a new country appear on my statistics page and can hardly wait to put it in my draft page.  It's kind of like Ellie in "Contact", who was delighted when she could contact someone from a new location on her ham radio, or like my father, who as a child combed short-wave radio frequencies, looking for new stations from faraway countries.  There's something fun about knowing someone far away reached out and virtually touched you, even if only for a moment.

With the influx of spammers, I've manged to collect a couple of new and (for me) rare countries for my list.  (I think this is the only one of my blogs which has received a hit from Botswana, the 57th country listed.)

If the spammers can help me get new countries to add to my record, I guess I can tolerate the clean-up effort reasonably well.

SWTOR and Spam?

In the last three weeks, I have found a plethora of spam comments which people have attempted to post to this blog.

It's crazy.  I have three blogs, all very lightly trafficked, and this is the only one which attracts spam, often to the tune of four to six a day.  (Or more!)

Fortunately, Blogger sends me an e-mail whenever someone tries to post any sort of comment, and their spam filters usually manage to segregate the spam, so all that is left to me is to confirm the nature of said spam and delete it.

But it leads me to wonder, "Why this blog?  Why not my retired WoW blog which still gets several hits a day on the newly updated Vuhdo setup guide for Restoration Druids?  Why not my bread blog which has a wider audience, although not as many hits per day?"

Did someone decide my post on Lord Vivicar got enough hits it might be a happy hunting ground for everything from mulch sales to unmentionables and sold the URL to a bunch of spammers?  How do they figure out these things?

I have no idea.  But for whatever reason, this blog has recently had a drastic increase in maintenance requirements.

To all you spammers:  I'm on to you.  Save yourself the effort.