Monday, August 8, 2016

The Russians Are Coming Were Here...

Утро стрелецкой казни (The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy) by Vasily Surikov (Source)

A while back (here) I noticed that the number of hits here at The Chant seemed to be increasing by, what we like to call, a crap ton. Before going on let me define what I mean by a "hit." Blogger maintains a count of how many times (per day) that the website is accessed. Early on I noticed that when I was looking at my own posts, I was inadvertently increasing the hit count. Rather than bounce in and out of a post just to increase the count, I turned off the "include myself" (not the actual term) method of increasing one's hits. Once that was done, the hit count seemed to settle down to around 40 or 50 a day.

Now I do know that the number of folks stopping by here to read our drivel thoughts has increased substantially since those halcyon days of early 2012. To wit...



he red arrow indicates the starting point of The Chant's existence, the green arrow is as of early August 2016, the two black arrows indicate a couple of anomalous peaks (or WTF moments as I like to think of them) with question marks indicating other anomalies. That's just to give you the "context" of the situation.

Over the past month, I (and others, Comrade Misfit for one) noticed an increase (of major proportions) from Russia. Yes, Russia. Here's what the rough numbers looked like from early July to now.



While things have settled down to a certain extent, over the past month Russia has accounted for nearly 28% of the total hits.

The overall historical context looks a bit different...



Still a lot of hits from Russia (mostly spambots I'd guess) but 43% of those have come in the past month, the other 57% have been over the last four years! (Not counting last month.) So what happened? Did we somehow withstand an invasion of epic (hit wise) proportions from some Russian computer network?

Or has The Chant suddenly become hugely popular in Russia?

Is this one of these?


I dunno but here's what today's numbers look like, so far...

Mother Russia is scarcely on the radar! Those numbers above are what I'm used to seeing (proportionally) since the day we started. I think the hits we get from France are due to the name of the blog, nothing more. Maybe it's my Napoleonic proclivities. Or not.

I know! Let's have a parade!


2015 Moscow Victory Day Parade (Source)

Am I sucking up to the Russians?

Нет, вовсе нет. (Well, maybe a little...)



16 comments:

  1. I do remember that Lex used to comment on the inordinate amount of time he spent fighting Russian spam ("If you only knew" he would say..)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whew, so it's a long term thing and it ain't just me.

      Good to know, Virgil.

      Delete
  2. Maybe y'all could find that old movie, " The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming " and provide a link. If it's free to view, of course.

    Paul L. Quandt

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If you watch the video clip above on YouTube (which is from the movie you cite) then search for the movie title, you might be able to find the full movie. It's my experience that those "watch the whole movie here" links are invariably scams which could cost one a lot of moola. Caveat emptor!

      Delete
  3. I've been getting bogus hits for 3 months from Russia and the US. It is annoying!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Agreed. Though the Rooskis do seemed to have toned it down the past cuppla.

      Delete
  4. On my blog it runs in cycles. One to two months lots of hits from Russia. Then, almost none. What is puzzling is the five to ten hits a day from Qatar. Maybe an expat?

    ReplyDelete
  5. I remember once when I hit Lexs' site @ O-Dark Thirty or so local Sandy Eggo time (we were living at Marina del Rey then) and there were nothing but pages upon pages of solid Russian gibberish. I ask him what was going on and he said it had slipped thru his defences and that it was a 24/7/365 kind of thing with our friends over there. To use my quote, above, he said "Virgil, if you only knew what I go through to keep this site clean." Oh yeah, he also asked me why in the world I was up at that time of the morning and I replied that I always tried to catch Foxs' Red Eye then (which showed at 0300 PCT) "Have you ever heard of a thing called Tivo?" he replied. LOL!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Classic Lex!

      Haven't seen much in the way of spam, Blogger's defenses seem to work better than WordPress's. (I spend at least a few minutes a week cleaning up over at The Lexicans. Maybe 10 to 15 spam comments a week, mostly English. Well, I should say bad English.)

      Delete
  6. I missed this yesterday ...darn.
    If it wasn't for Russian and British spies, I wouldn't have much traffic on my blog at all.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Я не знаю.

    The traffic from Мать-Россия seems to be dying down. Over the last 24 hours, it's down to 15-1, Americans over Russians. Over the last week, it was 1.5 Russian page views over American ones.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I am experiencing a similar phenomenon.

      Maybe they're changing magazines. Regrouping.

      Delete
    2. Over the last 24 hours, the Russians have gone away. Maybe they're preoccupied in getting ready to fuck with the Ukrainians.

      Delete
    3. Hahaha! That right there is a good theory.

      Delete

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