Traffic returns to normal
I'm delighted to report that after a protacted period of heavy public access, Tikkabik's stats are more or less returning to normal.
This all got started earlier this month when I posted a few comments about the ever-popular Iraqi information minister who must not be named lest my traffic skyrocket again. Within a few days I was seeing what is, for Tikkabik anyway, an astounding amount of traffic.
The site, which averaged only a few hundred page impressions per day, spiked at 13,092 in one day, and thereafter sustained steady traffic of between 3,000 - 5,000 page impressions. I was pushing hundreds of megabytes of bandwidth per day as people were visiting the ever lengthening forums for these stories, posting comments, and refreshing. My service provider, Pair.com, handled the added load without any trouble whatsoever, and so did Movable Type -- a testament to the competence of both technologies.
My e-mail box was flooded with copies of postings to the forums attached to those messages, from what seemed to be a peculiar combination of people with good senses of humor about the whole thing to jabbering lunatics with only a loose grip on reality, let alone the English language. In fact, some weren't posting in English at all -- there are at least a couple of posts embedded in there in Arabic, believe it or not.
Anyway, eventually I took two steps to curtail traffic -- the first was to forbid anonymous posting. Of course, determined people simply fed garbage into the e-mail field and left it at that, and it was fine -- but it did reduce traffic overall, rather dramatically.
Eventually, however, my patience was exhausted with it. After all, Tikkabik is a diary of sorts, a running commentary of whatever's on my mind. I have no interest in monetizing this site, so increasing traffic to the point of advertising sustainability (if such a thing even exists on the Web anymore) is not a concern. See, my editorial perspective on Tikkabik is distinctly different from the content I'm responsible for in my career: I have only a passing interest in hearing from people who have an opinion about what I write, and usually that interest ends completely if you're not someone I know personally.
So a few days ago I finally locked down the forums on those posts all together, forbidding people from posting anything at all, and that seems to have nipped the problem in the bud. There has been some leakage of complete fucking imbeciles who seem to think it's necessary to post off-topic messages about the Iraq war in other forums, but for the most part it's back to normal. I've also reconfigured the blog so anonymous posters can post again, just in case you have some bug up your ass about having your e-mail address mined by spammers.
Traffic has been steadily dropping day to day since then, to the previously maintained levels. I'm happy with that.