lucy24 - 9:01 pm on Sep 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hear, hear. If a supervisor can't tell if an employee is working up to standard, maybe it's the supervisor who needs to go. With due nod to Peter Principle.

But seriously... This timing is just too exquisitely perfect. At the very time that this discussion was going on, someone somewhere read one of my e-books. (It comes with many small images, so it creates a visible blip in the logs. I had to add some stuff about google translate in my hotlinks routine. This batch, atypically, didn't ask for translation into Spanish.) They e-mailed the link to a friend at a major university.

Within 90-odd seconds after reading his e-mail, the friend was on Facebook saying, presumably, "this is a great picture book!" Another human hit is immediately followed by the facebookexternalhotlink robot trying to grab everything in sight. (403 for the images after an inexplicable 206 for the main file.) And another and another and another, all giving facebook as the referer. Many came from the same school's IP block, meaning that our putative student is putting stuff on facebook as a means of reaching people he knows in person.

I think it was safe to assume these are students, not faculty members.