There's a new kind of Spam in town

I just opened another blog, this one about my League of Legends experiences. I split it off since I didn't want to bother any regular readers I might have here with the game. I do talk about EVE-Online here, but that's different because it often highlights issues that are interesting beyond the game itself.

Soon after opening the new blog, I found some traffic coming from weird places, like this. It looks like people are setting up bots to crawl other sites just to generate links in the traffic history. Since the URLs are cryptic, the hapless site owners follow the links wondering what they are. These links also have codes embedded in them (not in the one I posted above) so they can tell which of their hits work. I'm guessing I have inadvertently told these sites that someone is in fact watching their stats, and they will pass the address on to other such bots.

How annoying.