Commonly abbreviated HFS!, it is a superlative and therefore cannot be modified (for instance, “maximum HFS!” is incorrect, but “nearly HFS!”, while considered by purists to be common and vulgar, is not).

Also, note the “!” in “HFS!” This is required to differentiate HFS! from the more mundane acronyms for Health & Family Services, Hierarchical File System, or Historic Fort Snelling. It does not indicate an excited mode of speech; rather, it is pronounced as a glottal stop, such as what one would hear at the beginning of an gulp of abject fear, as an audible precursor to the gag reflex, or both.

More than likely. Even some legitimate spiders (cough*Yahoo*cough) have to be told to meter their visits; otherwise they act like a reverse firehose and suck up HUGE chunks of your data & bandwidth in seconds.

The email harvesters (and comment/forum spammers) are pretty easy to catch, since they will follow every link they find on your page, despite a robots.txt prohibition of same. So whenever anyone visits a page on one of my sites named, oh, emailaddresses.asp (specifically flagged DISALLOW in the site’s robots.txt), their IP is automatically added to a private DB (one used to check a visitor’s IP on every visit). From that point on, visits from that IP are redirected to a 14-byte page containing simply “access denied.” If the bot still persists in megavisits, I manually ban the IP from accessing the site entirely.

If you’re having serious problems with harvesters/bots, you may want to join Project Honeypot. There’s a whole culture out there in innertubeland dedicated to tracking and driving a stake through the hearts of harvesters/commentbots.

McGoo’s got adult material? I’ll be back …. much later.

A while back, my site had a sudden huge (to me) burst of hit activity. We’re talking 500-600 hits in an hour or less for NO REASON. Then it completely stopped. I happened to be watching at the time and did not understand why/where/who was doing this.

So was it a spider or ‘bot or two taking a sudden interest in me, and then moving on – or being blocked (finally) by WordPress?

On Great Britain politics: Obviously I’m not gonna ‘get it’ in one easy lesson.

Sitemeter filters out spiders and email harvesters. I manage sites that often take thousands of hits in an hour (from harvesters and spiders) and sitemeter will show just the couple hundred “legitimate” visits.

I’m happy that spiders like google and yahoo, et al, visit the various sites I manage, but I’ve written a “bot-trap” that logs the IP of harvesters and redirects them to a gotcha! page (forever).

The egregious George Galloway lost, big time.

Yeah, yeah. Galloway, McDermott. No wonder I got ‘em confused.

The egregious George Galloway lost, big time. And the BNP picked up a seat. They’re kind of like the Klan party, so it’s not good news. But it is a measure of discontent.

Sounds like you got a bunch of ‘McCains’ in.

Panicked by years in the wilderness, the Tory high-ups put a bland, Leftist, Greenie airhead in charge of the party (David Cameron) just as the public had finally begun to realise what a pack of liars, whores, pimps, cheats and criminals were running the show.

As the Tories have finally kicked Labour out of office in town halls across the land, people are wrongly attributing that success to the adoption of Leftist Greenie polices when, in fact, it was simply down to timing.

I’m glad Boris won London (Livingstone is Stalinist filth of the very highest order) but he is a loose cannon and could do great harm.

So what we have here is the right result for the wrong people. Unless Mr McBean’s government collapses early, we won’t get the chance for a real change for another two years. Between now and then expect a full-on attack on the Tories from the UK media (led by the thoroughly politically corrupt BBC).

Personally, I think they will fail to save Labour, whose stock is at a record low, and I think the Tories will win the next election – but they will be Tories in name only.