A half-million pageviews later
I bet y’all never thought you’d see one of these entries again 
2nd month of 6,000+ visitors!
law:/dev/null crossed the 500,000 pageview milestone back in mid-November and I’ve been meaning to do another one of these entries ever since. Then studying and taking finals and working and vacation snuck in and I never got around to it 
But December 2010 was our 2nd-best-trafficked month since we started — despite two 5-day absences — so I figure that calls for celebration! 
Quite a bit has changed on the server backend of the blog since July, including an increasingly aggressive (and thus far successful) effort at stomping out spammers.
Take a look at one of the new graphs I created below, which shows the number of spammy visitor sources I’ve added to the .htaccess file for banning. I recently started throwing in some keyword bans just to reduce the number of directives the server is processing; for example, instead of banning every spammer coming here from a buythisrandomdrugplz.com address, I’ve just decided to ban all the referers with “buy” in the URL. ((On the ever-so-slim chance you happen to get here from a legit source with “buy” (or any other banned keyword)Â in the URL and you get one of our lovely error pages, just reload law:/dev/null manually and you should be able to see everything 
))
The net result? While July featured an almost comically-absurd abundance of spam comments and we had a couple recurrence spikes in August and October, we’ve “purified” the traffic enough that December had the lowest number of spam visitors in the entire history of law:/dev/null
The downside is that the bans kill our pageviews-per-day and Alexa traffic stats, the latter of which are used for determining things like avvo.com’s Top Legal Blogs.
Over 1,000+ spammy domains banned!
Our ranking has steadily dropped like a stone over the past two months while sites like Bitter Lawyer — which has become spam-blasted and hasn’t had fresh content in 3+ months — actually find their stats going up over that same timespan 
But, just between you, me, and the interwebz: I’d prefer having 6,000+ flesh-and-blood visitors a month actually reading this stuff instead of tens-of-thousands of spammers just crawling for comment forms 
We’ll see if we can keep our current anti-spam success going in the new year. Honestly I’m just pretty amazed / impressed / blown away that we had as many visitors as we did in December, especially given my infrequent posting. So thanks to all of you 
***
On the search query front, we’ve had over 1,000 new queries since the last time I did one of these lists 
Here are 20 of the 240+ unique search terms that brought folks here in December 2010:
- time magazine decade from hell picture: the picture was more thoughtful than the story itself
- 1l grade wait: will be at least a month for most law schools, sorry
- human shooting target: didn’t survive my concealed carry qualification shooting
- nccu law school grades: aren’t due until January 12th
- badass eagle: was briefly considered for my new gravatar — but I decided to stick with my current colonial eagle instead
- is law school worth it: yes
- is law school really worth it: yes
- t4 law school worth it?: probably
- essay explaining why i would attend north carolina central university: here’s a tip: if you can find it on Google, the admissions staff can find it on Google too
- if you turn in your tag for lapse in north carolina can you turn around and get a 30 day temporary tag: I could, so you probably can too
- gpa ncsu computer science: hopefully yours is higher than mine
- final exam advice: check out this entry and this entry — and GOOD LUCK!
- 1l gpa for top 10%: depends on where you’re going to school, but for the NCCU Law Class of 2012 it was around 3.28
- hey tar heels… kick rocks: please
- people v andrew madison mock trial keys to win: villify the Queen of Hearts
- first kid movie: was my first/only foray in a Hollywood movie (check #19 on that list and see my FB profile for the pics )
- how can a 24 year old get money for law school: apply for students loans. Lots of loans.
- do classmates know your 1l grades: usually no, unless they do really well
- grading curve nccu law: follows a strict-C, which I’m apparently the only one supporting
- can’t stand law students: then you’re probably reading the wrong blog
I missed going through these monthly…
***
And finally, here are the Top 5 most-viewed posts for the month of December 2010:
- On tackling finals: TDot’s Tips: More Final Exam Advice (11/30/10)
- On Fall 2010 grade expectations: Halfway done! (12/12/10)
- On combating spammers: Fight WordPress comment spam with .htaccess (08/04/10)
- On law students around the web: Law School Roundup #247 (12/19/10)
- On figuring out what to do with my life: Straddling the fence (12/13/10)
*THANK YOU* again to each of you for your continued support of us here at law:/dev/null!
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Past Site Stats entries:
- July 2010 Stats: When internet memes attack…
- June 2010 Stats: Shameless attention-whoring FTW
- May 2010 Stats: Apparently we’re nomnom-licious?
- April 2010 Stats: “You like me, you really like me!”
- March 2010 Stats: Site stats and queries and graphs, oh my!
