90% of the traffic that I get here is spam. This blog is of little interest except to those who are interesting in my plugins.
I keep two kinds of statistics. One is using Awstats and is based on the raw HTML logs for the site. The other is through MyBlogLog (going away soon, alas). MyBlogLog uses javascript so that it does not see spiders or many of the spammers.
Awstats reports neary 10 times the action on this site that MyBlogLog reports. Some of that comes from hits to my RSS feed. The feed aggregators bang on the RSS of any site that has a decent Google page rank. Some of it comes from spiders, although Awstats is good about segregating spider hits.
I is likely that I get less than 50 readers a day here, but I am being hit by about 300 or more spammers trying to drop off their little messes.
I have been working with people who are creating WordPress Honeypots, or sites that have no purpose except to attract spam. One of them is getting 200 hits an hour. I wrote an application that reports all of these hits to the StopForumSpam database. My own Stop Spammer Registrations plugin is also providing lots of data for the SFS database.
The results have been good. Between my own plugin and Akismet, no spam hits my site. I report anything that is makes its way through moderation. As a result, I am getting lots of hits on the site – 300 or so a day, but only 50 legit readers. The rest are spammers who are blocked. They are wasting their time here. I have unlimited bandwidth, so it is not a big deal.
I am now writing a plugin that automatically reports any comment attempts to the SFS database for the guys running the honeypots. I am sure that this will result in even more limitations on the spammers.
Thank you-thank you for the wonderful plugin you created, it is the best of its kind anywhere on the net. I have been using it for about 2 weeks and it has cut down on spam, saved me precious time of blocking IP’s on my own. This is a great site and I will definitely put a link of yours on my site and study the other wonderful creations you’ve made such a contribution to the world you deserve the Nobel Spam Prize! Thank you again.