“Where did all these people come from?”
Hey y’all! 
It’s been half a year since our last Site Stats entry back in June, not for lack of time or interest but mostly because traffic tended to stagnate with my random disappearances all the time. Even with us passing 1,000,000+ pageviews back in September, there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy to merit another entry.
November '11 now holds the all-time attendance record 
Then a whole bunch of y’all appeared out of nowhere! 
November 2011 was officially the single busiest month law:/dev/null has had since we launched back in August 2009!
And I have absolutely no clue why 
We had a +6.7% bump in daily readership to 2,041,1 likely resulting from my somewhat-less-sporadic posting over the month.
But the real craziness is the sudden +57.4% explosion in unique people coming to the site (8,144)2 — leapfrogging our previous record back in October 2010 of 6,716, and for reasons totally unknown to me.
There wasn’t a sudden bump in Google searches, no random spike in RSS readership,3 no particularly controversial posts that I’m aware of, and yet somehow we still had a whole bunch ‘o newcomers stop by this little piece of internet real estate.
The war on spammers continues...
And what makes the unique IP number particularly odd is that it came alongside us blocking an unprecedented number of spammers that would otherwise be distorting the traffic figures.
In what has become my WordPress equivalent of the government’s War on Drugs, on a regular basis I go through our logs line-by-line and wall off this space from an ever-growing number of bots and spamdexers via our .htaccess file. It’s virtually eliminated comment spam (0.00479 spam comments per IP last month) but has the side effect of holding down the traffic figures.
Which is just as good since I don’t really count spammers as “real” visitors, but it’s still weird seeing such a jump in readership knowing there are about 2,000 URLs blocked from sending people here.
Anyhow, to the new folks: *WELCOME*, and thank you for visiting! 
 Hopefully you’ll enjoy it and keep coming back.
Doubt we’ll hit this level of traffic again any time soon but we’ll see what happens…
***
The main reason I started putting these entries together ages ago was to go through some of the search queries that send people to the site. So here’s a random selection of 20 out of the 580+ unique search terms that brought folks here in November 2011:4
- can a footnote go under the signature on a legal doc: Depends on the document, and depends on the rule of construction the courts in that jurisdiction use; some courts allow it, others consider anything past the signature (including footnotes) as “surplusage” that has no legal effect.
- nccu law bad neighborhood: Aside from a drug bust at the local Burger King and the occasional stuff that happen on every sizable college campus, it’s really not that bad.
- can you petition your gpa if you are within less than 2 tenths away from cum laude: In the words of MDG, “LOL. no.” (at least not here at NCCU Law)
- lawyers in state legislatures: Are a surprising rarity
- i’m panicking wording: Freaking out. Melting down. Losing your nerve. Having a psychotic episode. Taking a law school exam. Let me know if I should continue…
- how often do people get kicked out for 2l grades: Not often compared to 1L year because people can self-select their classes, but it does happen. The frequency doesn’t matter, all that matters is whether or not your GPA is above a 2.0
- how to get a job with bad grades in law: (1) Develop a personality, then (2) network. If you exclude me tutoring CrimLaw (where the grade for that single class was a smidge important), I’ve had exactly -0- employers care about my GPA for the various law jobs/internships I’ve had. Particularly in smaller firms, people care more about whether or not they can tolerate working with you every day than whether or not you were Top 10% academically. Make sure you have a solid LinkedIn profile, go to various law-related events, attend CLEs, get to know your professors and career services personnel, and so on — that way when openings pop up, people are willing to recommend you or at least clue you in to the vacancy.
- american travel blog first impression toronto: I loved loved loved it! Awesome place.
- dueces fingers with white background: You’d probably have more success spelling it correctly (“deuces”), but until then you can use the pic from this old UNCASG-related entry.
- college students taking classes unrelated to their major: Yep, that’s how I made my way through N.C. State
- why do you want to go to nc central law?: Ummm… if you don’t know the answer to that question already, you probably don’t want to go here
 If you want my reasons, you can read my “Why NCCU Law?” entry linked at the top of this page. - is law school still worth it: Nothing has happened to change my perspective (Part I and Part II) so I’d say “yes.”
- can you fail duke law?: On a B+ curve? And risk the school losing $51K+ a year in tuition in fees per student? It might be theoretically possible, but I doubt it happens
- 1l grades most important: I certainly hope not or I’m screwed. I prefer my own $.02: your 1L grades don’t matter.
- va beach snowmageddon: Terrifying at the time, but pretty effing cool in retrospect
- sulc has too many white students: With budget cuts going on and minimum bar passage rates slated to rise, my guess is SULC has bigger things to worry about
- november mpre 2011 thoughts: It sucked. But I passed.
- “closing argument” “let me try that again” good morning: Assuming you’re planning to try something similar to the Chief’s greeting back at 1L Orientation: please don’t. I’ve yet to find a single person who thinks this tactic is humorous or anything but annoying.
- how to get caught up law school: When you figure it out, please let me know
- young lawyers division ridiculous: That’s actually not the first time I’ve heard this. Aside from the YLD’s incomplete approach to transparency in law school statistics, a number of them were downright rude during the ABA Annual Meeting this past summer. I guess being esquires entitles them to be pricks? Hopefully that won’t be me this time next year.
Nothing particularly risqué in this month’s batch of queries, but I still enjoyed digging through them
***
To wrap things up, here are the Top 5 posts from November 2011:5
- On NCCU Law’s strict-C curve: In support of the strict C: a year later (11/12/11)
- On thinking about going solo: Should I just go solo after graduation? (Part I) (11/27/11)
- On pros/cons for going solo: Should I just go solo after graduation? (Part II) (11/29/11)
- On the irrelevance of 1L grades: Your 1L Grades Don’t Matter (05/29/11)
- On the November ’11 MPRE: That was remarkably unpleasant (11/05/11)
And that’s it for this entry! *THANK YOU* as always for your continued support of law:/dev/null, it’s greatly appreciated! 
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From the Site Stats archives:
- November 2011 Stats: “Where did all these people come from?” (12/09/11) [this entry]
- May 2011 Stats: Queries queries everywhere (06/11/11)
- December 2010 Stats: A half-million pageviews later (01/03/11)
- July 2010 Stats: When internet memes attack… (08/15/10)
- June 2010 Stats: Shameless attention-whoring FTW (07/03/10)
- May 2010 Stats: Apparently we’re nomnom-licious? (06/02/10)
- April 2010 Stats: “You like me, you really like me!” (05/02/10)
- March 2010 Stats: Site stats and queries and graphs, oh my! (04/01/10)
- +23.4% year-over-year since November 2010, for those who like analytics [↩]
- +57.1% year-over-year [↩]
- We’re actually back down to 116 RSS readers, which is more in line with our historical average. Looks like the previous spike was an aberration. [↩]
- Down -18.4% compared to last month, but up +81.25% year-over-year [↩]
- An odd collection considering #2 and #3 were only up for a couple days before the month ended, and #3 was posted half a year ago [↩]
