Paula Light is the lovely hostess for The Monday Peeve, where I get to do the thing I cannot do in real life – air my inner most complaints.

You know what I hate? Spammers and clickbots messing with my stats.

Last week, I got particularly more views than usual, especially on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday when spammers and clickbots attacked not only my homepage, but also my About and Contact Me pages. You might think I’m crazy, who doesn’t like free views? This concerns me.

What are they doing, clicking on my homepage 100+ a day? Are they trying to copy my blog posts?

Thankfully, I never display full posts on my homepage, so even if they copy my blog posts, they’ll only get a summary. This wasn’t the first time this sort of thing happened. The last time it happened, it was last December when clickbots clicked on one of my post 5000+ times in a matter of 3 weeks.

This sort of thing is very annoying and frustrating because it inflates my stats and as an accountant, I am very meticulous and anal- retentive about such thing. I’m also the sort of person who likes to work for my views. I don’t want to get my views from a bunch of robots clicking on my homepage 100+ times a day. That’s not satisfying.

My other gripe this week is about phishers. If you don’t know what those are, they are a type of spammer that likes to go fishing for your information and they are the dangerous kind because they are sometimes hard to tell whether they’re legit or spam.

I often get Chinese text messages on my phone from some guy I’ve never heard of, wanting to get together for a reunion. I don’t know how these people know I can read Chinese or that I am Chinese. I recently answered one in English and never heard back.

I also get messages on my LinkedIn in Chinese, which angers me. Just because I have a Chinese name and look Chinese on my profile picture doesn’t mean I embrace being one. I may be born in China but China is just a place where I spent a decade of my life, doesn’t mean I’ve ever embraced being Chinese, unlike the rest of the family, and I don’t appreciate it being looked as one despite the US has been my home for the last 20+ years.