digicam.coza Stats

Clicking through my Thunderbird folders that collect filtered, low priority messages (which I check on an irregular basis), I discovered the following: since the beginning of last month I've received 350 Account Activation requests via digicam.coza. All of them from spammers. This after deleting over 1000 spam comments on the site a few months ago, before I enabled account activation. The eCard feature is also taking abuse. Lovely!

digicam.coza, online since March 2002, consists of 2895 images in 123 categories. In it's horribly stagnant state (last updated late 2004 when I joined Flickr), it currently ranks 2nd in Google for the keyword 'digicam'. I noticed this a while ago but never understood why, so I checked my stats hoping to find a possible explanation. They revealed the following:

• Each month the site is attracting an average of 20 000 visits (60 000 page views, 250 000 hits) and is consuming over 6GB of bandwidth.
• So far this month, Tuesday has received half the number of visits than any other day of the week. Wednesdays are most popular. Traffic peaks at 7pm.
• MySpace users account for over 75% of the total monthly hits, who are using my images as their profile backgrounds: example 1, example 2 (those are the most popular). Then there are the Friendster, LiveJournal and Xanga users too.
• Google Image Search accounts for 93% of the total hits from a search engine, followed by Google Web Search (5.5%), Yahoo (0.7%), MSN (0.4%) and AOL (0.2%).
• Top keyphrases used on search engines after 'digicam' include 'shark eggs', 'cherry trees', 'yde', 'butt crack' and 'mr bean car'. Of the total 268 different phrases so far this month, the longest is 'i hated kurt cobain i killed him i hate myself too and i want to kill myself too'.
• Two geographical page views are via Niue (.nu) - an island nation located in the South Pacific Ocean and one of the world's largest coral islands. Who niue?!
• There have only been two 404 status codes (Document Not Found) this entire year, both were backdoor attempts.

There's some memorable stuff up there - my short-lived Poetic Terrorism project (don't ask), some of my old Photoshop Contest entries, Candy, Idols presenter (who remembers that?) and the Kurt Cobain tee photo (check the comments, hilarious!).

I'm not about to retire the site any day soon. One of my original intentions for it was to build a South African Digital Photography community. I haven't abandoned that idea completely, but it might be a while still. Until then I'll continue to entertain the idea of generating online child-safety hype by adding some server rules to serve all MySpace requests with goatse instead. Or not wanting to be old skool, a gigantic animated gif that flashes "coda 0wnz0rs your MySpace" at epileptic-inducing speeds. Decisions, decisions.