Thursday, August 02, 2012
What's with 10.144.128 and Sitemeter? // Fixed.
I suspect the 10.144.128 range of IPs has somehow taken over Sitemeter listings as of about 3 PM yesterday.
If it were a pure automatic bot, I'd think all of its 'visits' would show a zero length. Instead, the pattern of times and lengths looks the same as usual, with a few 2 or 3 minute reads scattered among the 0-length reads.
The difference is that all the IPs are 10.144.128.# instead of the usual mixture of nations and sources. So it looks more like a 'detour' than a simple bot. A brief look at Google shows that other Blogspot-based blogs are noticing the same phenomenon.
Also: Blogspot's own statistics (independent of Sitemeter) show 14 reads of the blog coming from Sitemeter. Within Sitemeter, the 10.144.128 source made exactly 14 page-reads.
5 hours later: Yikes! It's getting worse! In the 5 hours since I posted this item, there are now 96 "reads" from that one IP. Normally I get that many reads in a full week. Again, a few of them them look like real human reads, but most are single-page zero-length.
= = = = =
Finally fixed. I removed the Sitemeter widget from my template, and the hits stopped. Obviously the hits seen by Sitemeter stopped; that's how it should work! ... but ALSO the hits as seen by Blogspot's own statistics stopped. So the hits were enabled by the Sitemeter widget.
Graph from Blogspot. I edited the template at 12:54 PM.
= = = = =
And a couple days later: According to the Twitter feed of one tech type, this whole mess was not a bot at all. It was Sitemeter changing its servers and missing some of its usual information. In other words, those mysterious reads that appeared to be in the normal time pattern were in the normal pattern, they just lacked the normal URL references. I've put the Sitemeter widget back, and things seem to have returned to normal. You'd think Sitemeter would want to provide info about these things, but apparently it doesn't. = = = = = Finally, Nov 2012, after several more failures and oddities, I switched to Statcounter. I don't know if Statcounter goes weird as often as Sitemeter, but at least Statcounter announces when it has a problem so you can tell what's happening! Also, Statcounter seems to give a somewhat more useful set of info. ¶ 6:11 AM
If it were a pure automatic bot, I'd think all of its 'visits' would show a zero length. Instead, the pattern of times and lengths looks the same as usual, with a few 2 or 3 minute reads scattered among the 0-length reads.
The difference is that all the IPs are 10.144.128.# instead of the usual mixture of nations and sources. So it looks more like a 'detour' than a simple bot. A brief look at Google shows that other Blogspot-based blogs are noticing the same phenomenon.
Also: Blogspot's own statistics (independent of Sitemeter) show 14 reads of the blog coming from Sitemeter. Within Sitemeter, the 10.144.128 source made exactly 14 page-reads.
5 hours later: Yikes! It's getting worse! In the 5 hours since I posted this item, there are now 96 "reads" from that one IP. Normally I get that many reads in a full week. Again, a few of them them look like real human reads, but most are single-page zero-length.
= = = = =
Finally fixed. I removed the Sitemeter widget from my template, and the hits stopped. Obviously the hits seen by Sitemeter stopped; that's how it should work! ... but ALSO the hits as seen by Blogspot's own statistics stopped. So the hits were enabled by the Sitemeter widget.
Graph from Blogspot. I edited the template at 12:54 PM.
= = = = =
And a couple days later: According to the Twitter feed of one tech type, this whole mess was not a bot at all. It was Sitemeter changing its servers and missing some of its usual information. In other words, those mysterious reads that appeared to be in the normal time pattern were in the normal pattern, they just lacked the normal URL references. I've put the Sitemeter widget back, and things seem to have returned to normal. You'd think Sitemeter would want to provide info about these things, but apparently it doesn't. = = = = = Finally, Nov 2012, after several more failures and oddities, I switched to Statcounter. I don't know if Statcounter goes weird as often as Sitemeter, but at least Statcounter announces when it has a problem so you can tell what's happening! Also, Statcounter seems to give a somewhat more useful set of info. ¶ 6:11 AM
