[The lines of vertical scaling go from zero to 75 by 15s]
Visitors to this blog, until recently, were legitimately running about 150 per day. Occasionally, it would get a spike or two of a few hundred hits ... which could run the total to even a thousand. These hits were clearly being generated by a bot ... located in the US from a Google referring URL ... and didn’t seem to land on any particular post. I have speculated that this bot might be controlled by the developers at Blogspot (owned by Google) for many possible reasons ... most of which are suspicious.
Now, as can be noticed by the above chart of hit activity on this blog, the bot algorithm seems to have changed a little over a week ago. Instead of one big spike of hits, the current padding appears to be to adding a number of ersatz hits to every real one ... maybe from 5 to 10 extra. The net effect is that this blog is now receiving a thousand or more hits a day instead of 150.
This largess, of course, is all for nought since BlogSpot has refused to allow me to monetize with ads my efforts here. If recompense was my objective, I would not be happy. But, dear reader, my only real hope is that I can add a little to the contemporary discussion of interesting things.
Afterward: (Monday, PM) Just had a spike of over 180 blog hits on top of the pattern just described ... which leads me to believe that are two distinct bots now padding the activity here ... second located in Czechia ... Wow! Why me?
