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Statbombing

Alright, Mr. 147.46.244.*.  Over the past 10 days, you’ve hit my site an average of 9.4 times per day, from six different user-agents -- four linux and two freebsd.  The majority of these >90 visits were zero-duration hits to my /stats/ page.  I can only guess that this is an attempt to increase the percentage of linux and freebsd OSes, and mozilla and opera browsers, in my statistics.

It’s trivial for me to remove these hits from my log and cause my logger to ignore you in the future.  But I’d rather not do that if I can instead convince you to stop trying to game the system here.

Posted by Anthony on Mar 22, 2004 | 4 replies
Filed under: General

Comments:

01. Mar 22, 2004 at 06:26pm by Tasha Moyer:

Why would someone want to do this?  What does it mean?

02. Mar 22, 2004 at 09:24pm by Anthony:

As I said, I can only speculate on what the person’s motives are.  Hopefully he/she will reply here.

My guess is that they’re trying to make it look as though more people use Linux and FreeBSD (instead of Windows), and Mozilla and Opera (instead of Internet Explorer), than actually do.

My stats from March 2003 to February 2004 indicate that:

Visitors’ Browsers:
12% Mozilla
1% Opera

Visitors’ Operating Systems:
5% Linux
0% FreeBSD

But because this person has been hitting my site 10x per day for the past 10 days with various versions of Mozilla and Opera running on Linux and FreeBSD systems, the stats for March 2004 now show:

Browsers:
45% Mozilla
7% Opera

OSes:
17% Linux
5% FreeBSD

The point of the stats is to see which configurations are more or less popular among my visitors.  When you have a person who is intentionally visiting the site 10 times per day from 6 different configurations (and not actually reading anything on the site; just getting logged and leaving), it makes those statistics a lot less useful.

03. Mar 23, 2004 at 08:39am by Tasha Moyer:

Well, I have your site set as my homepage, and I use Mozilla. So, every time I go online (which is a lot, even to not intentionally visit your site, it will log me on as Mozilla, right? So, will that mess things up having it as  my homepage?

04. Mar 23, 2004 at 02:30pm by Anthony:

No.  Looking at my log, you only have 2 or sometimes 3 visits per day, and usually one or two of them are actual visits that last a few minutes, meaning you probably came to actually read something.

Also, the logger will notice if you’re the same person from an earlier visit (based on a combination of a few different things, like IP address, browser, operating system, and some other things), and won’t re-count you, if the second visit is close enough in time to the earlier visit.  (Where "close enough" is a timeframe that I can adjust for the very purpose of minimizing these kinds of problems, and has generally worked well.)

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