The Hit Parade

Apparently I am being spammed by some soulless moron.

Blogger has a nifty little feature where they keep track of all the people who visit your page.  Not individually, of course – I’m sure there’s a software package I can buy that will allow me to do that, but to be honest that’s more work than I feel like devoting to an issue that is mildly amusing at best – but in the aggregate.  It tells me broad things – how many hits the site gets overall in a given time period, the top ten traffic sources and individual posts, where the traffic comes from (Brazil is big this week) and so on.  For some reason it also tells me what browser people use when they come here.

People still use Internet Explorer.  Did you know that?  I didn’t.

I like to see what people find interesting here.  It changes over time, though history posts are usually popular and the political posts are always guaranteed to spark an interest.  I don’t do whole posts on politics much anymore because they depress me too much – seriously, Donald Trump is an extinction-level threat to the survival of the American republic and the fact so many people in this country either refuse to see it or are okay with it would have been enough to make Gandhi take up an axe – but I throw in my views (see what I did there?) and once in a while I still devote an entire post to the topic.  People also seem to like the turkeys.  I do too.

The stats feature has become rather useless of late, however.  Somewhere out there – and I’m fairly sure I know the referring site, even if I refuse to dignify their moral vacuity by naming them here – there is a spammer who has found me.  Every five to seven hours like clockwork he (statistically you can be fairly sure that spammers are male) pings this blog with about 135 random hits, mostly of the recent things.

Now this has happened before.  The goal here is for me to click on the traffic source link so they can either infect my computer with the latest and greatest malware or simply bombard me with advertising links.  Or both.  The internet is full of people who aren’t worth the space they take up on the planet (go ahead, read the comment section of your local newspaper’s online edition – I dare you) and you just get used to it.  It usually lasts for a few days and then the spammers move on to some other target, one that might actually make them money.

But this has been going on for three weeks now.  It’s getting tiresome.

No, I’m not going to click on your damned link, Mr. Spammer.  No, I’m not interested in whatever you’re selling.  Eventually I will simply stop looking at my stats and your efforts will become even more useless than they already are.

Until then, I just shake my head in wonder at the limitless crassness of the internet and move on with my day, just that much more annoyed at the world because of it.