The Phantom Site Spammer Strikes Again!

Rohn

Has anyone else noticed that just about every day some game - usually an old or niche game - receives a wildly inordinate amount of hits, as recorded on the "Most Popular" section of the MMORPG.com homepage?

Today, for reasons that do not seem apparent to me, Entropia Universe has received almost 14K hits on this site.  No significant news has been reported for this title in a while, and its forum shows little activity, yet it's leading in hits for today.

Asheron's Call II - a game that's been literally dead for years - is #2 in popularity for the week with over 56K hits.

These are just a couple of instances of this anomolous activity.  Over the past few months, these games and others have been the beneficiary of some questionable hit counts.

Is this a big deal?  Probably not, other than MMORPG.com likely charges for advertising using hit counts as a basis for pricing.  People "running up the count" makes those numbers suspect.

It's just odd, and makes the popularity counter less useful.

Recommend some way of monitoring or controlling site-hit spam.

Leagolx

it could just be actually happening.