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1. lizwired
   Member
   May 7, 2008, 10:35 PM

   I've got a quick question about the effect of Askimet on my stat counts. I've noticed lately that my Total Page Views, Referrers, and Top Posts & Pages have a strange habit of fluctuating up and down, with the overall trend of going in the up direction.

   For example, let's say my Total (All Time) Page Views is at 100. If I refresh my browser that number will drop down to 90. Sometimes it goes back up to 100 (or more) and other times it only rebounds to 98. I've also noticed that the amount of spam being caught by Askimet is off the charts lately.

   So my question is, is it possible that some of my page views are from spammers and initially being counted as views, then they are marked as spam by Askimet and as such are being removed from being counted as legit page views? Are the two even related?

   Help! I'm clueless.

   Thanks,

   ~Liz

   http://lizwired.com

2. raincoaster
   Member
   May 7, 2008, 11:18 PM

   Interesting question. I wish I had some info for you, but I suspect only staff can answer and whether or not they will is anyone's guess. You might try contacting Akismet and asking.

3. mark
   Staff
   May 7, 2008, 11:35 PM

   "is it possible that some of my page views are from spammers and initially being counted as views, then they are marked as spam by Askimet and as such are being removed from being counted as legit page views?"

   No. Spammers do not actually visit your page. They use scripts on machines that hit as many blogs as they can find so they have no impact on stats.
   Except.... sometimes there are real people who get paid to write spam on blogs. They will count in your stats because it's a real person but if you then marked them as spam it would have no effect on stats.

4. pkayski
   Member
   May 7, 2008, 11:42 PM

   In a similar note to this, I have noticed that if you got spam (lets say 2 spam comments) your spam count goes from 5 to 7. Now if they happened to be legit and you 'demarked' them as spam, the total amount that akismet caught still stays at 7. But shouldn't the number go down to 5 to reflect the fact that what akismet caught was not in fact spam?

   I know its a silly little note but I just thought id mention it ;P

   Cheers!

5. lizwired
   Member
   May 8, 2008, 12:37 AM

   @ raincoaster - Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't considered contacting Askimet directly.

   @ Mark - So if spam and/or Askimet have no effect on my stats why do the Total Views, Referrers and Top Posts & Pages numbers go up and down? Shouldn't they always go up? Where do those page view vaporize to? And more to the point, why?

   If it helps I've been getting a ton of hits from PSI IP's starting with 38.xx... Normally these have been snap preview bots but I'm wondering if something else is up there.

   Still feeling clueless...

   Thanks for the help!

   ~Liz

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