Or, as an alternate title, why I should consider sleep rather than caffeine to get me through the night. I’m noticing, though it may just be a horrible coincidince, that the more spam comments I pick up over here, the more likely I am to actually attract something vaguely resembling legitimate trafic to the blog. As a case study, I looked at a sampling of statistics gathered so far–specificly, today’s to this point. And, assuming most spammers still prefer to use methods that don’t actually involve anything sophisticated–like, say, javascript–in their work, I discovered that to this point, I’ve picked up 4 trash comments and 3 actual, legitimate, supposedly non-spammy visitors. Likewise, over the course of the last we’ll say two weeks, I’ve amassed a total of 245 spam comments. Over the course of the past month or so, Google’s tracked about 200 actual, supposedly legitimate folks coming to the blog via one method or another–mostly via direct visits right now.
Now, I’m hardly the kind of blogger that’d attract massive amounts of visitors, so this is probably not a very accurate or telling sampling, but this is what happens when I’m randomly curious. If gaging spam rates was all it took to tell how much attention your blog was getting from people in general, this would be just way too easy.
But, because I started this thing on random curiosity, I’m going to extend my curiosity to others. If you maintain a blog that allows you to track trafic in some way, shape or form, I’m wondering if you’ve noticed a similar increase in spam comments relative to actual legitimate trafic that hasn’t yet tripped the spam trigger. Or, has the level of spam comments tended to differ from the increase in trafic? If you’re up for it, toss a general opinion on this–based on experience or not, your choice–in the comments. Inquiring minds want to know.