One’s a fun way to spend a day at a mini race track, the other is a complete pain in the ass when you’re trying to run a website. We investigate both.
The Good:
Well that would have to be the Remote Control Cars of course! In preparation for the AARCMCC 2015 State titles on the weekend I was invited down the Bendigo RC track for an interview with Theo the president of the Bendigo On Road Radio Controlled Car Club and much to my amusement, a fang around with his legendary Dodge Challenger:
“If there’s a road going version of it, there’s a remote control version somewhere.”
Fang was about right as in between talk about the titles, owning an Rx7, his previous career as a panel beater (he put the amazing paint job on the Dodge Challenger himself) and the love of cars in general, Theo was brave enough to throw me the keys (okay, the hi tech remote complete with settings for ten different cars) and gave me a basic rundown of piloting the Dodge around a nearby carpark.
“Pull back to accelerate and forward to brake” – no there’s no reverse on this thing as I seem to be the only pilot that puts a car like this in situations where it needs it. He also warned me the be careful of the nearby drain entrance, which seemed just big enough to swallow a Dodge Challenger remote control car whole. Of course me being me and the car park being big enough to build a family home in, I still managed to wedge the poor Dodge Challenger right into the drain entrance. Thankfully there was no damage and after carefully edging it out, I was back to high speed turns and learning the ins and outs of the sport and how hideously addictive everything can be. (Theo never actually admitted what his Dodge Challenger RC might be worth but I shudder to think with all the gear in and on it)
My rating out of 10 when I was done? -2 according to Theo. That’s a lot better than I thought I’d get! 😀
Still, I got to check out some amazing examples of high speed remote control fury while I was there:
Want to find out more about the Bendigo club? Check out all the info here
Right then, onto the bad
Referrer spam – the traffic from random sites that choke up your stat counters with pointless visits as they spend a total of zero seconds actually reading your hard work. You can find out more about what it is and why it’s a bad (and truly annoying when running a site) right here but basically if you have supposed visits from these idiots:
forum.topic50931524.darodar.com
ilovevitaly.co
priceg.com
blackhatworth.com
buttons-for-website.com
blackhatworth.com*
forum.topic50931524.darodar.com
simple-share-buttons.com
www.o-o-6-o-o.com
s.click.aliexpress.com
humanorightswatch.org
Then welcome to my boat my friend, it’s a brief excitement from a high number of views followed by crushing defeat when you realism it’s mostly spam. The good news is that the link above gives you a few options and personally I’ve found that Lester Chan’s fantastic WP-BAN is a plugin that works really well too. Just chuck in all the sites causing you grief in the Banned referrers section and enjoy some real stats for a change. (You can even set up a message for them when they try to get at your site – highly enjoyable!)
(Anyone else being plagued by these idiots?)