Rob's Blog

…well, in the anti virus blogging world anyway.

Last Wednesday morning, I noticed my Norton Anti Virus software blocking JavaScript on quite a lot of reputable websites. Deciding these sites were almost certainly not all compromised, I wrote a post about it, suggesting that it was a false-positive.

Throughout the morning I noticed (thanks to the fantstic Woopra service) I was getting a few more visits than normal, mainly via Technorati.

Suddenly at around lunch time I started to get what was at the time an unprecidented number of visitors to the site – up to 5 visitors live on the site at one time. These were coming from Google – they had started to pick up my post in the search results.

The five live visitors soon grew quickly to over 40, and I started to get comments – my post soon became the place to discuss this problem, and collectivly we came up with a couple of potential temporary solutions.

Soon the live visitors was growing to around 50 or 60 at a time on the site, as more people started to link to the post to explain to their visitors why they were getting errors on their sites. Somone added the site to Digg (my first Digg I think), and that only increased visitors.

It was really interesting to watch the visits coming in on Woopra. Sites all over the web linked to my post. Ammusingly my second largest referer of all time (after Digg) is now Literotica, who linked to my post on their front page.

Thanks to all who commented, letting users know they weren’t on their own. I even got an official statement posted from Symentec, although admittedly after the fix was released.

For those who like figures, Since I installed Woopra, it has logged 3863 visits in total to my blog. It logged 1934 on Wed 10 Dec, and 357 on Thurs 11. That’s nearly 60% of my visitors in two days. Today I’ve had just the one visitor, and that’s from me to test the tracking was still working!

Overall, I’m glad I could help people with info on the error. It was great being able to watch the visits live as they came in from all over the world on Woopra – a great service.

I’ve recently noticed in my logs lots of visits to my posts from a Microsoft IP block (the last one was 65.55.109.226), supposedly with a referrer of http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=[random keyword]&form=QBHP .

My posts never appear on the search results page, in fact some keywords are completely irrelevant.

The visits even show up in my Woopra log, which means the bots must support JavaScript. Annoyingly due the the low volume of visits to my site, this is really throwing off my statistics. In particular, because the bot is reporting a screen resolution of 800×600, my total stats show 14% of visitors have that resolution (which clearly isn’t accurate).

I found this post on Blogboing (and this older one), and this fuller explanation (including instructions on how to block it), which partially explains them, but the Microsoft response is clearly rubbish. As far as I’m concerned, this is just referrer spam, and another reason not to use Live Search!

I don’t think I’ll block them for now, but may do if it continues.