World Chelonian Trust?

I'm not saying that this is intentional abuse, but when I see stats such as this, it throws flags all over the field:

  Today 1 Days Ago 2 Days Ago 3 Days Ago 4 Days Ago Average 
Hits 60203 4498 4040 3531 2771 15008 
Unique 12935 1125 949 981 691 3336 
Clicks 13 3 8 4 3 6

These stats were captured around 12:30pm on 01/05/04. 60,000 hits in 13 hours with a prior average of 3,500 or so? I don't think so.

Something is DEFINITELY wrong, and I had no choice but to disable that account.

Dear Webmaster,

The stats that appear to be abuse for the World Chelonian Trust website are in fact accurate. There has just been another SARS outbreak in China and the government has ordered 10,000 civets to be euthanized.

The World Chelonian Trust has a comprehensive overview of the markets of China in 5 languages including pages on the civets which is why our site quite simply exploded this morning with page hits.

Please reinstate the site in good standing with your wonderful page counter. Your stats site is one of the best out there.

Thank-you.

Chris

Chris Tabaka, DVM
Detroit Zoo
World Chelonian Trust- veterinary advisor and trustee

Aw hell. Now I feel like a jerk. The only way I could disable that account was by deleting it. That program doesn't have any facility to do it any other way.

I am sorry! But I monitored the page counter on that site and compared them with the hits being applied to the FaunaTopSites hit counter and they just did not come anywhere NEAR being similar. Matter of fact, the hits for today were pretty near to exceeding the TOTAL hits listed on the sites internal hit counter. That indicated to me either a program malfunction of some sort or obvious abuse.

I did send a couple of emails addressed to the webmaster of the site, but got no response.

Again, my apologies, but my server was getting pounded by what looked like bogus hits to me and I felt I had no choice in the matter.

If I could reenter the data myself and recover your listing I would fall all over myself to do that.

Bummer...

Understood on the strange stat explosion. I've never seen anything like it. Really too bad you can't recover the data though. It was a lot of fun watching everyone pour in and go through our series on the Chinese animal markets. A large number of folks, particularly in the media, learned about the Asian Turtle Crisis today.

Thanks for the reply.

Chris

I think I have recovered the account info to get it back into the FaunaTopSites listing. I had to extract it from the nightly backup file. Of course, the listing has data from it from 4am this morning, but hopefully at least it is back up on the site. Wasn't exactly an easy thing to do, but it was my fault so I just took my lumps and did it.

I sure stepped on my own tongue on this one......

My sincerest apologies!!

Thanks for getting things back online.

Chris

Yahoo just linked to the WCT Chinese market pages again so thus the second day of explosive Fauna badge hits.

For anyone interested in seeing what the situation is in the Chinese markets for chelonians, snakes, amphibians, birds, and mammals, check it out via the following link:

World Chelonian Trust- the Animal Markets of China

assuming we don't break our server's back today.

Chris