The Digg Effect Part 2: Reporting on the results of comment spam.

Earlier today, I posted some comment spam on Digg to see what effect it would have on my website. I only posted the URL to my blog in about 5 comments on the site. I didn't want to do a huge spamming operation because that is not the point of this study.

This is a non-scientific study. I'm using a 10 hour block of time.

When this part of the study is over, I'll report back on the Digg Effect when you have a story submitted to Digg. Whether or not it turns into a "front page" story or not will greatly affect the next, and final, posting in this series.

Either way, thank you for helping me out with this study.

Day	Number of visits	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
01 Sep 2006	67	329	644	16.92 MB
02 Sep 2006	48	171	280	5.25 MB
03 Sep 2006	55	372	470	8.96 MB
04 Sep 2006	56	270	437	12.55 MB
05 Sep 2006	50	311	414	6.58 MB
06 Sep 2006	40	203	421	11.65 MB
07 Sep 2006	268	1377	2587	13.64 MB
08 Sep 2006	0	0	0	0
Average	83.43	433.29	750.43	10.79 MB
Total	584	3033	5253	75.56 MB
Hours	Pages	Hits	Bandwidth
00	23	36	1.27 MB
01	32	45	6.29 MB
02	74	176	725.18 KB
03	104	197	2.48 MB
04	90	150	3.67 MB
05	60	138	767.13 KB
06	58	115	3.22 MB
07	116	195	2.19 MB
08	173	287	8.23 MB
09	192	371	1.86 MB
10	335	589	4.00 MB
11	461	900	3.46 MB
12	207	339	2.64 MB
13	194	334	4.80 MB
14	186	301	1.26 MB
15	233	314	7.25 MB
16	152	222	2.37 MB
17	60	85	1.41 MB
18	106	147	2.63 MB
19	57	132	3.72 MB
20	64	98	4.99 MB
21	15	23	126.34 KB
22	29	47	6.11 MB
23	12	12	129.43 KB

Well, there is a vast increase in hits, but not in bandwidth.

The hits peaked near lunch time PST.

From this short bit of information I can see that comment spamming on Digg is something that can be easily abused and I'm glad signature lines are not allowed. At the same time, why would you blindly click a link in someone's comment that just points you to their blog?

I can see this being abused by a person who purchases multiple domains and points them all to a page of advertisments. By using multiple accounts they can easily steer a few thousand hits a day to these sites with only a minimum of work.