Message Board

Newbie/Basic Questions

Home page data

Author: L.King (8 Mar 10 4:08pm)

Just to be sure I understand the data provided on the Dashboard.

# Harvester visits to your site(s): 5

Based on the next data item I assume this is a count of "known" harvester that visit my site. Or is it known harvesters that collected an address from my Honey Pot?

# Spam traps issued on your sites: 64

Or it this a count of email addresses collected from my HP?

# Spam received at your addresses:

This does confuse me. I this the number of actual Honey Pot addresses collected that have been used?

# Traffic from your QuickLinks: 101 visit(s)

Is this the number of times that the QuickLink issued to me has been followed to a HP hosted by someone else?

I'm not suggesting any change in data collection, I'm just trying to understand what you have.
For example I wonder why the "QuickLinks" count is consistently larger than "spam traps issues."? The number and location of QuickLinks and links to my HP are similar. If these are comparable number, then I would try some things to make them more effective.

Re: Home page data

Author: M.Prince (9 Mar 10 1:01am)

- Harvester visits is known harvesters.
- Spam traps issued is how many spam trap email addresses have been handed out. Across the entire Project Honey Pot network, about 5/100 spam traps end up being issued to actual harvesters. The rest of the spam traps get issued to search engines and other bots that are not harvesting email addresses.
- Spam received at your addresses is the email spam that have gone to those 5 spam traps issued on your site.
- Traffic from your QuickLinks is the number of visits that have come from quicklinks you are using. Why is this larger? Who knows. Could be that where you've placed the links for QuickLinks gets more traffic for whatever reason. The visits are about 2x, so if you've put the QuickLinks in 2x as many places then that would explain that. Or could just be random variation. If the disparity between the two stays high as the numbers get larger, there's probably an underlying cause.

Re: Home page data

Author: L.King (9 Mar 10 9:12am)

Thanks MP that's what I needed.
There is a small offset due to when I added the QuickLinks, but the 2x ratio has remained close; Change has been clumpy but steady over time (short). On most available web pages the QL and my HP links are "always" in that order. The format of the links vary. I guess the rule here is - never give a math major more than 2 numbers unless you want him to look for a pattern. <g>