I was rather surprised at a jump in my stats yesterday. This morning they were higher than normal so I did a little digging. My CAPTCHA image is blocking attempts to post comment spam, and that's good. Whoever set up the spam used a virus to spread the hits since they came from all over and I loathe to block IP's that are home users.

But the Spammers, may they rot in Hell, don't give up that easily. But the approach they're taking is odd. They're acting as referrals which means they show up in my admin logs but nowhere else. For all the work and effort they had to put into designing a system that would automatically hit posts over and over, the effort is wasted as only one person sees the results (and can easily discard).

What bothers me the most is that it artificially inflates my visitor numbers. I don't like to lie to myself when it comes to stats and as a seasoned Web professional I'm wary of what I see anyway. So it's hard to gauge how many people are actually visiting versus how many are spam bots, and that sucks.

Like Clint Eastwood said to Michael "Dude, Where's My Scruples?" Moore, if I ever meet a Spammer, I'll kill them.

I mean it.