Re: GNOME Foundation Elections - Preliminary results

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 23:15 +0100, David Neary wrote:

> It's surprising that dgo and wgo are even so close together - a 
> developer:user ratio of 10:1 would not surprise me, and for something 
> like Mozilla, the platform users/developers are probably under 1% of the 
> application users now. dgo could certainly be more MSDN-like, but I 
> don't think it'll ever have as much traffic as wgo (especially if wgo 
> finally gets that makeover people have been talking about for so long).

It's not clear to me *why* people are coming to www.gnome.org (I think
I said this on the web list a while ago...) we really don't have much
end-user oriented content there. Are people coming because they heard
about GNOME on some news media and want to learn more? Are they coming
for tech support (and being disappointed?) 

We get an amazing number of hits on www.gnome.org for a site with
(more or less) no content. According to webalyzer, a *million* times in
November, someone went to the root of http://www.gnome.org. What were
they looking for?

Actually, looking at the logs, it appears that many of these hits
aren't legitimate - our top (non-empty referrers) from today

    100 "http://proizvodstvo.yard.ru";
    100 "http://pokrishki.subs.ru";
     86 "http://tohosaku.hp.infoseek.co.jp/sfdiary/";
     54 "http://medportal.dynu.net/mortgage/";
     53 "http://medportal.dynu.net/buy-phentermine/";
     52 "http://medportal.dynu.net/buy-viagra/";

Referrers like these are about half of the 6000 hits on / today.
I don't understand the logic here ... it's not really intense enough
to be DDOS, but why would you make requests on a site just to distort
stats and stuff spam URLs into the referrer? (Some sort of attempt to
influence google ad-sense?)

Regards,
					Owen