Classified as dangerous

I have watched over the last couple months as my readership in Russia has taken off. There have been a few times when Russian readership is higher than American readership. By January 19 the number of page hits for the month from all sources topped the number of hits for all of December.

The blogging statistics also tell me what sites refer readers to my site. A Russian site was consistently at the top of that list. So I clicked on it. My security system told me that was a Dangerous Page and I probably didn't want to go there. I agreed and the reference to my site will remain a mystery to me.

Today I updated a personal website page that I use for teaching, adding a few more sound file links. When I brought it up to verify I had done it correctly I was told it was a Dangerous Page. Something strange here.

I started a chat session with the security system support and told the staff person about it. She guided me to a place that would evaluate the page (yup, dangerous), and then allow me to override the classification. I don't want my students to be told the page with their homework assignment is Dangerous.

During the chat I asked why my site was tagged. I wanted to know what was wrong so I could fix it. I got responses such as, "It could be any number of things," and, "The important thing now is to resolve the problem." I can smell evasion and said so. I can understand the need to protect algorithms and to not want to admit the software goofed. However, I now have less trust in their software. I told her that too. Since she didn't tell me what I could fix I now suspect a goof in their algorithm that determines if a page is Dangerous. Another possibility, since I found another personal page declared Dangerous, is the algorithm classified all pages from the same server -- which includes all personal web pages hosted by a giant internet provider.

That doesn't mean I'm going to go back to that Russian site, even though I'm still curious. I would welcome any of my Russian readers to leave a comment telling me about how they found my blog.

Another little detail from the readership statistics: the latest country to show up is St. Vincent and the Grenadines. It's a series of tiny islands in the eastern Caribbean.