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1. ouroboros
   Member
   Dec 10, 2008, 11:15 PM

   I deleted an article a few days ago, but the article continues to accumulate hits that are recorded on the Blog Stats page. After deletion, the hits have been showing up as an article with a numerical title (1359 -- I think this was the post number), and an empty link: http://ouroboros.wordpress.com///

   To be clear: I don't mean that the old hits from before deletion are still visible on the records from those days in the past. I mean that in the two days since I deleted the post, it has still logged thousands of hits per day.

   How is this possible? Why is a deleted article still recording new hits? (How is it even possible for a reader to hit a deleted article in the first place?)

   And most importantly: How can I make it go away?

   That's the important bit. There's some more background below:

   The deleted article was getting ~10k hits a day (even before I deleted it), far far more than my entire blog. But the thousands of hits smelled weirdly artificial: there was no referrer; the article itself is pretty dull (so I doubted it had become a huge "hit"); and it just seemed likely that some bot script somewhere was downloading the page again and again at intervals. So these thousands of hits were totally swamping out everything else, making Blog Stats sort of useless (or at least frustrating, since the graphical representation is dominated by these mysterious hits).

   That's primarily why I deleted the article in the first place -- I didn't want to keep seeing all of these nonsense hits. But even after deletion, the thing lives on. I'd really like to make it go away.

   In case it's helpful, the original article had the following URL:

   http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/2008-hillblom-meeting-morning-session-1/

   I have since created a new post with another URL (see below), copied the old text into that post, and deleted the original. Note that the new post behaves totally normally; I'm just including it for completeness' sake.

   http://ouroboros.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/2008-hillblom-meeting-morning-session-1a/

   Thank you in advance for any help you might be able to provide.

2. thelifeofmarkwhitecotton
   Member
   Dec 10, 2008, 11:16 PM

   Because people must be clicking on it from a cached entry or clicking from a blog entry where your story is linked. There's many possibilities.

3. thelifeofmarkwhitecotton
   Member
   Dec 10, 2008, 11:17 PM

   If I had been you, I would've updated the post stating that you're noticing a huge amount of hits. What gives?

4. raincoaster
   Member
   Dec 10, 2008, 11:41 PM

   My guess would be that whatever autorefresher was slamming you before is still doing it, and just too stupid to realize it's going to a 404. Contact staff and see if they can do something about getting it off your stats page.

5. ouroboros
   Member
   Dec 11, 2008, 12:54 AM

   I did update the post for a while, asking the reader to let me know where they had come from, but no one ever responded -- another reason why I didn't think the hits were from real readers.

   Unless a kind staffer sees this forum post and takes pity on me, I will indeed contact WP staff and see whether they can help me get the post off my stats page.

6. ouroboros
   Member
   Dec 11, 2008, 5:13 PM

   WordPress staffers? Any ideas about how to wipe this annoying article off of my stats page?

   (How does one contact staff directly?)

7. raincoaster
   Member
   Dec 12, 2008, 11:18 AM

   When you click the Help button on your dashboard, you've got two choices: forums or support. Choose support.

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