In a period of 41 seconds on December 21, this site got hits purportedly following links from 75 different pages on scholarsandrogues.com, 21 on russia-insider.com, 21 on www.africaresource.com, 21 on irwinvillagetourzjamaica.com, 20 on jaykeating.com, 18 on *.ox.ac.uk, 17 on www.zylstra.org, 16 on www.nobleprog.de, 13 on ciaplescounreds.me.pn, and 10 pages on 5 other sites.

And then in 33 seconds on December 26: 57 pages on blog.tcmpage.com, 21 on worldpeace.org, 20 on faoumonso.strefa.pl, 14 on hudepajuw.inmart.asia, 13 on www.greendirectory.com, 11 on amary.site90.com, 9 on piratebox.site, 8 on www.strangehistory.net, 8 on masini.00author.com, 7 on lints.atwebpages.com, and 63 pages on 38 other sites.

No site appears in both of these clusters. Some are obvious spammers; some are genuine blogs; fourteen are small Picasa galleries, with no outgoing links.

The requests came from 99 different addresses; again none are in both clusters.

Later: When I finished examining my referral log for December, I decided it’s no longer worthwhile, particularly since Google usually doesn’t tell me what the search string was.

My busiest comment-spammer is not even trying: stuff like “syycvugmerscztigiejbuzgshfmb”. Come on now!

A month or two ago, the load of junkmail intercepted for me by Pobox suddenly jumped from about one hundred pieces a day to well over two hundred. (The difference, to judge by titles, consists of repeated pleadings from alleged horny women.)

I have long been in the habit of carefully searching the spam reports for false positives, typically finding one every 3–4 days. (Each of these is a mass-mailing to which I subscribed; I don’t recall if Pobox has ever held up genuine personal mail, though Gmail did, back when that was my primary mailbox.) Now that the burden of this chore has suddenly doubled, I find myself wishing Pobox would make more errors, to reward me.

I see an analogy with the uncanny valley phenomenon, and wonder whether anyone has tried to find a psychological optimum in error rates for problems like this.

I once read somewhere that a “teaser” toy for cats should let the cat catch the “prey” one time in six.

I get this comment a lot:

Hello Web Admin, I noticed that your On-Page SEO is is missing a few factors, for one you do not use all three H tags in your post, also I notice that you are not using bold or italics properly in your SEO optimization. . . .

I probably also don’t sprinkle enough chicken’s blood.

Each month I look through my HTTP log for new incoming links. Most of them are phony. In December, Russian porno was up and other commercial spam was down.

This may be the most effusive comment ever received on this modest blog:

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Each month I check my HTTP referral logs, and find that nearly all of the “referring” pages that I haven’t seen before are spam. Usually there are also a few sites showing one of my images as examples of some theme or other. Now here’s one of both classes: a page of auto-generated SEO drivel containing one of my pix, apparently because the description contains the word “binary”.