Some very suspicious characters have been spotted at the Gateway Western Railway recently.
Last month, the WMRC blog had a surprising and very suspicious increase in the number of hits it received from Russia. On July 21, we had 1,030 views, mostly from Russia. On July 26, we had 807, also mostly from Russia. Our average daily number of views is usually around 130. There couldn’t be that many model railroaders in Russia who are interested in our club, which led us to suspect that Russian “bots” (which is a slang term for “robots”, which are actually programmed computers) were cruising the site for personal information.
Please note that the WMRC blog has never posted any personal information other than the names of some of our members, and the location of our meeting places and open houses. So the robots aren’t going find anything, but that won’t stop them from trying.
So we beefed up the security of the blog site. You might notice that the site's web address now has an HTTPS in front of it, which means that it’s an encrypted site, just like the websites of the banks and any places of business that exchange money on-line. This will prevent the robots from investigating the site, but it will also mean that the number of hits we receive will be discernibly less.
Last month we got 7,202 hits, which is a record breaker, but it doesn’t mean very much outhouse hits were created by Russian robots. Last week we got all of two hits from Russia.
Let’s see how many hits we get in August. Regardless of the amount, at least they'll be honest ones!
