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...)