Is This What We Have Come To?

Let's talk about internet safety. Occasionally I will look at the stats on my photography blog. I haven't done it for a while, in fact I haven't even been to my photo blog in 6 months, so when I went yesterday and updated it I decided to check. Imagine my surprise to find that it had over 60 views yesterday morning alone. Odd.

I looked at the referring addresses. Suspicious.

adsensewatchdog and vampirestat. I will not even bother to put the dot com after each address. Do not click on these links if you see them.

I googled them and was even more confused.

The following information is from SpamSpoiler.blogspot.com:

"If you have a blog and check to see where the traffic to your blog originates, you may notice traffic from websites called Vampirestat.com, Adsensewatchdog.com, Villainstat.com, Uglystat.com and/or Zombiestat.com. First off, don't click on them to find out why they are sending you traffic.

Neither Adsensewatchdog, nor any of these others have anything whatsoever to do with Google or Google AdSense and are essentially spam sites that use automated traffic to blogs to attract clicks to their own sites from blog owners such as you. Once you're at their site, at a minimum, you'll be fed ads. At worst, you might fall victim to malevolent code that seeks to infect your computer with who knows what (although I haven't verified that these particular sites are seeking to plant anything on your machine)." 

What I don't understand is why people do this. It makes me want to set my blog to private. Obviously this is something that I really don't want to do, but along with the weird spammers, I am also getting a lot of traffic from other areas and people looking at my blog who I do not know. This is slightly unnerving. This may be the end of my "open blog policy".

We'll see.

p.s. I have no problem with strangers looking at my blog as long as you make yourself known. Leave a comment. Something to let me know you are normal and not some weirdo.