A dumb question

[NFFC]

Just about to take over promoting an existing site, looking at the existing stats there are an awful lot of visits where the browser tag is simply "Java 1.1", I have no idea what this means.

Can anyone educate me?

[Brett_Tabke]

Umm, simple: someone running a java based spider. You'll set many of those from time to time Nffc.

[NFFC]

Thanks.

The thing that troubles me is that there are so many on this particular site.

The site gets over 4000 visits per week and "Java 1.1" is over a third of the total, week in week out.

[Brett_Tabke]

Do you have something dynamic on the site that is getting spidered by someone?

I have that problem over at SEW all the time with people raiding news.

[NFFC]

No not at all.

I had the thought that someone was spoofing false hits on the site.

[Brett_Tabke]

Something don't add up there NFFC. That doesn't seem right. I'd start looking at raw logs and see what they are pulling for pages and looking for referrers.

Every-once-in-awhile, I get someone who frames me with a java pull of the page. Are the hits all from the same ip or host block? that should be a giveaway - but you know how to look for that. hmm

[NFFC]

In the end it looks like it was the weird navigation menu on the site. Apart from taking about 3 days to load it also generated the "false" hits in the web based stats package. One thing I learned from this is to never promote a site that doesn't have access to raw log files, they are an essential part of the webmasters armoury.