I’ve been playing around with the stats available on DreamHost, and the results are interesting.

Fully a quarter of site visitors now come from Google and from VersionTracker.

Over a third of visitors, unsurprisingly, use Safari. The next popular browsers are MSIE (hm), Mozilla derivatives and NetNewsWire, that last one with about 10%. The number of bots is higher than I expected; some bots even download .dmg files, I can’t imagine what for.

The failure reports are the most interesting part. Fully 12% of accesses over this month so far seem to be various forms of attacks, mostly the tired old attacks against phpbb forums using one of the published scripts. A few people try to run one of the awstat scripts (which I don’t use), or some Microsoft-server-specific thing (which I don’t use either). For the last 3 days, about 60% of all requests have been phpbb attacks, like in the peak days in January, when the Santy worm was going around. Don’t these people have anything better to do?

At the same time, this weblog has been hit daily with comment spam, referrer spam and link spam – the latter by people registering with fake web addresses which redirect to some gambling or porn site. I’m not accepting any such users – they’re very easy to spot – and their links would be tagged with “nofollow” anyway. I don’t publish referrer lists, so referrer spam doesn’t work either. If comment spam volume grows, well, I’ll have to install a little modification to have posts wait for moderator approval…