Click on the map on the right. It is a visual display of where traffic to this web site originated during the month of February, 2006. Does anything jump out at you? I’m huge in Beijing and Bankok. And after the United States, the Phillipines sends more traffic to this site than any other country. Why?
I’d like to think it’s my thoughtful musings that attract such an international audience, but I suspect something more sinister. I’ve been a big fan of Movable Type, the software I use to manage this blog, for a few years now. And when I upgraded to the current version, I was particularly pleased with its built-in capability to recognize and divert junk comments. But recently, the junk has been slipping through, big time. I had the settings configured so that no comments went live until I approved them, so none of them ever got posted. But my time was still wasted in having to delete them by the dozens, day after day.
Here’s an example, “Your site is very nice 🙂 Respect to admin !”. In February, I had about 1300 such junk comments posted here.
What’s the point? Apparently it’s all about the return link to their own web sites that they can put in their comment, and the boosted Google rankings they will gain by widely spreading links to their site.
Well, as much as I enjoy the legitimate comments I do receive on my blog, I’ve got better things to do that clean-up the digital trash being left here from the other side of the world. So, for now anyway, I’ve disabled all comments in hopes they’ll go away, or a new upgrade of Movable Type can again give me the upper hand in this ridiculous battle against comment spam.