YJL

Few days ago, I noticed some mass strange hits on this blog, I thought it’s an attack. Earlier, the mass hits came again right after I posted Lightweight YouTube Player Loader. It’s pretty clear to me, “YouTube” is the trigger. It could be post title or label name. The only issue is I still don’t know who makes the mass request. Just one or a group of bots? Where did they get the published data. The requests came really just after I hit Publish button.

Blogger Stats tab doesn’t provide raw access log. Google Analytics can’t help with this case, because those requests are not come from web browsers, therefore the script isn’t executed, and definitely not from human. Hundreds of requests, who would have such time to hit reload button? They must be made by bots.

I have thought if I change DNS record to other server, which I could see the detail with, the IPs. I do know they are from US, that’s Blogger Stats tells me. I want to know if it’s one IP or many IPs, and who owns the IP. But that would affect too much, even it’s just a short period. Besides, I can’t do anything, Blogger doesn’t allow you to filter out unwanted data. They can’t even classify those requests as bots even if there is a Bot tab, because those bots disguise themselves as Firefox and on Other Unix OSes.

To me it’s like my stats data is being contaminated but this kind of data is still useful but not so much for a blogger if you can’t have any means to deal with. I don’t think it’s spamming like fake referrer spamming (or the spammer forgets to add HTTP Referrer?), at least not intent to spam Blogger bloggers, because it would know we can’t know any detail except the number of hits, the fake user agent and the OS.

In my conclusion, there is nothing I could do. I believe I will get another mass hits in just about a second once more.