Flashes of Panic

Despite my best efforts, most of the leading referrers in my logs for the weekend are spammed. That’s really only an annoyance to me, because I don’t actually display my site stats anywhere; it’s just a waste of my time and the spammer’s processor cycles. (Not that they care; cycles are cheap, which is why they can waste my time with them.) Despite blocking the UA string Dorothea notes, it’s still the #3 UA string hitting my site. And…

I served more 403 Access Forbidden responses than real pages (200 OK) yesterday. 403 codes are now my top response code.

Remember the first time you got more spam email than real email in a day? I really hope this doesn’t go the same way, because the percentage of non-spam email at work right now is in the single digits.

I don’t have words for how pathetic this is.

Update: Tuesday, 18 January Monday’s logs were much better, though 403s again threatened to overtake 200s. I am also seeing 404s on the default MT comment and trackback script names, numbering in the hundreds; since I changed the names of those scripts, they’re just wasting cycles. I’m also getting some 404s on the true new names of the scripts—I capitalized some characters in the names, and the spammers are trying all lowercase. Silly spammers, URIs are always case-sensitive after the domain part!