The Traffic Report

[Roberta]

Aug 31, 2010 23:00:16 GMT -8 Brian said:

Roberta's reaction to the prospect of content spammers posting their links on this message board is understandable. But Anni and I can delete them as soon as we see them -- the way we hang, probably before anyone else would read them. In the past five days, there was only one identified content spammer, from Novosibirsk in southern Russia, visiting us.

This lights up the little bulb over my cartoon head, that Brian and Anni's role in keeping our message board a pleasant experience goes way beyond my shallow understanding of what it takes. Thanks!

[anni]

Sept 1, 2010 13:04:12 GMT -8 Roberta said:

This lights up the little bulb over my cartoon head, that Brian and Anni's role in keeping our message board a pleasant experience goes way beyond my shallow understanding of what it takes. Thanks!

An honor and a pleasure, to be sure!

Easy for me to say when it's Brian (and Bernaaard) really on the job!

[Brian]

In the past seven days, the message board has only had a few visits by potential comment spammers with IP addresses from Seattle, Chicago, Moscow and Omsk, Russia, and Cesis, Latvia. And we welcome the return of the friendly archiving bot from Yandex, Google's biggest rival in the Russian Federation.

The Googlebots still comprise a third to one half of our daily guest count, which is reaching new highs.

The phenomenon of the week occurred during one hour on Labor Day afternoon -- six actual human beings came here from back east: Great Lakes, Ill.; Houston, Tex.; Ossinging, N.Y.; Suffolk, Va.; Coram, N.Y. and Spring Valley, N.Y. The day before, we also had a guest from Dayton, Ohio.

[Brian]

Anni and I might be the only ones who read the Info Center on the bottom of the homepage. For 13 months, the most users -- members and guests -- counted on the message board in any ten-minute period was 6. Last night while we were standing on the corner, a new record of 10 was established because we had 9 international content spammers checking out the board within five minutes.

I've been learning slowly over the past two years. You might know that an IP address is like the phone number of your computer's attachment to your Internet Service Provider. I run them in a locator service that thinks I'm in Pacoima, which is close enough, then on Project Honey Pot. They lay traps on volunteers' websites to gather data on those who abuse the Internet in various, mostly nontoxic ways. Either we're not big enough or ProBoards' safeguards are keeping them from posting here.

I was going to list all of the exotic locales -- including Iran -- since my last post nine days ago, but it's late. Instead, I must note that three of those IP addresses last night were probably generated by human beings: Osaka, Japan; Paris, France and Centerport, New York.

[Brian]

Today, ProBoards added a new feature -- Tynt -- which I immediately installed our message board:

When someone copies and pastes text from your web site Tynt Insight automatically adds a link back to the original article with the paste. When the recipient clicks that URL, they are directed back to the original content.

Read more: Tynt » Frequently Asked Questions www.tynt.com/tynt-insight/frequently-asked-questions/#ixzz10QSB5R5x

I'd never heard of such a thing, but now when somebody copies and pastes your words here onto another website or even in an e-mail, that post gets linked. Of course, the person doing the quoting can delete the added line before posting or sending it. Still, I imagine Tynt will be picked up by other sites, so don't be surprised if you copy something elsewhere for your post here and a URL magically appears.

[Brian]

Since my last Traffic Report 13 days ago, the message board has received 27 first-time guests, most of them far flung foreign content spammers or big name domestic search engines, like Google and Microsoft. Two of the known content spamming IP addresses -- from St. Petersburg, Russia and Cesis, Latvia -- have come here several times without posting. Yet we've also had unidentified humans visiting from Tehran, Iran; Barinas, Venezuela; and Richmond, Virginia.

Lately, the board has been searched regularly by an outfit in Halmstad, Sweden named WorldLight Networks, which runs entireweb.com, an English language search engine in beta testing now. I clicked on that link and typed "Montrose Peace Vigil," and a link to this message board topped their list, better than Google or Yandex. I don't know why we've gotten more than our share of attention from Scandinavia. Maybe it's because of all the posts about the musical brothers from New Zealand, Tim and Neil Finn.

[anni]

Brian's yahoo account (his contacts) was hacked, and some of us have received viagra and cialis spam ads.
It will probably be sent to your in box, because it says it's from him, from his yahoo e-mail. There is nothing in the subject line. It's not from Brian, so just delete it...all should be fine.

We've taken one more step to protect the members of the montrose peace vigil message board...that is to hide everyone's e-mail address.

[Brian]

Oct 12, 2010 18:25:52 GMT -8 anni said:

We've taken one more step to protect the members of the montrose peace vigil message board...that is to hide everyone's e-mail address.

The mail spammer who hacked my Yahoo account last week also deleted all of my Sent messages on the way out, but everything's back to normal with my new password. I have no way of knowing if the hacker got my e-mail address from this message board -- or from somewhere else in the digital universe. I've had that account for seven years. Anyway, we've hidden everybody's e-mail address here. Members can also reach each other here using the Private Message feature: click on the "0 messages" link at the top of any page on the board, then "new message," or click on the member's name, then "Send Personal Message."

Comment spammers behave differently than mail spammers. They post their spam links on message boards. We're still being visited by them, often arriving in swarms every few days -- five within one five-minute span, for instance, from all over the globe -- but they don't post anything. And most don't return. Their IP addresses come from every nation on the planet, including Iraq.

Still, October's been remarkable for all of the new human guests from across the country, some repeatedly, and return visits from IP addresses not seen here for months. I'll write another Traffic Report next week.

[Brian]

My favorite locator service is at ipaddresslocation.org

October was the busiest month ever for the Montrose Peace Vigil message board. We had nearly 150 unique visitors, most of them returning guests. For the past couple of weeks, the potential content spammers have been almost entirely absent. But Google and the Swedish search engine entireweb.com continue to survey our pages. The board has also received a big increase in traffic from local IP addresses.

Consequently, it's taking me a lot longer just to keep track because I still write them down on paper like I did two years ago -- at some point, I'll have to give up or install some software to do it for me.

Yet I'm still having fun logging the guests who are probably real human beings. In October, we had visitors from these approximate locations: Overland Park, Kansas; Pekin, Illinois; Woodside, New York; Moscow, Russia; Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Austin, Texas; Lowell, Massachusetts; Sacramento, California; Pompano Beach, Florida; Surrey, British Columbia; Columbus, Ohio; Murraysville, Pennsylvania and Boeblingen, Germany. To name a few.

[Brian]

Googlebot, a friendly spider that crawls the World Wide Web.

This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for the Googlebots, our constant companions on this message board, surveying our content and linking us to the rest of the Internet. Multiple bots have visited daily throughout 2010 -- as I write this, 9 of the 16 guests that we've had in the past 24 hours were Googlebots.

Since the Montrose Peace Vigil message board also receives frequent visitors from other international search engines -- like entireweb.com in Sweden and Yandex.com in Russia -- I cannot account for the IP addresses that have shown up in the past three weeks from Lake in the Hills, Illinois; Bellevue, Washington; Union City, California and many cities closer to us in Southern California. But I especially want to acknowledge a repeat guest from Velikiy Navgorod in western Russia. Howdy!