Good news on the referral spam front: only 6 of the top 25 referrals were spammers, for a total of 187 hits between them. Lots more spammers with only a few hits per in the complete list, but this is a hopeful sign.

On the other hand, comment spam has started rising again, but mostly due to one porn web hosting company which sends hundreds of blog comment spams through each and every day, and has been for a few months now. Not a single one has made it onto the blog, of course, but they continue to spam away.

One more note: after peaking in April, visitor numbers have more or less held steady since then, though in the past month or two the number of spammers in the totals has been cut by the AwStats filter. Nevertheless, this month had the highest number of total unique visitors per month–22,554, a hundred or so higher than April, when spammers were fully counted in that total. Still, with some spammers getting through, the number of real visitors is more likely closer to 20,000, probably under that.