As many of you know, the interwebs used to be safe. In the early 1990s, it was like a very exclusive club for computer-inclined outsiders that had dial-up modems, good grammar and obscure hobbies. Nerdy and reclusive weirdoes could quietly publish GeoCities homepages about their cat-shaving businesses and needlework fetishes, without raising much of a fuss. Delusional middle-aged men could easily post tutorials on constructing homemade potato cannons, and nobody would notice. Not anymore.

Nowadays, the tubes are clogged with spambots, Nigerian scammers, 13-year-olds and ravenous techno-geeks, eager to trigger stampedes and knock down the doors of anybody cool enough to know that trick about transparent laptop screens. The rise of social bookmarking sites, blogrolls and online communities has led to what I like to call What The Hell Are All These People Doing On My Website syndrome.

Webmasters everywhere are finding themselves the unsuspecting victims of unprovoked traffic spikes. One of the worst perpetrators is a popular site called “Digg,” which is like a community-based “Hot or Not” for websites. Users can “digg” websites that they like, causing them to be ranked higher on the site, causing more people to visit, causing web servers to completely crash under the pressure.

THE PHYSICAL THREAT OF DIGG (Or, the physics of web crashes)

As most people know, web traffic is measured by clicks. Sort of. Web traffic is actually measured in Newtons (N), as indicated by the degree of force triggered by a user’s mouseclick. When the force wave generated by the mouseclick has traveled to the end of the internet tubes, it collides with the server and is registered by the server’s Newton Scale. It works very much like the Richter Scale. Web statistics take the force readings on the server’s Newton Scale and re-publish the numbers in the form of hit counters and web stats.

The average click generates 2.3 N (although Power Clickers have been known to generate up to 6 N of force with a single click). The average web server has a force threshold that can withstand a maximum of 217,391.3 Newtons of force per day (or, 500,000 mouseclicks). If 10,000 visitors access a website at the same time, this will trigger approximately 23,000 N of force. When a site gets Dugg, it usually sends a minimum of 34,500 N to the site within the span of one day. For most web servers, this is easy to handle. However, in cases where a site remains on the front page of Digg for an extended period of time, a server must face the brunt of over 2,300,000 N. This places an unbearable amount of physical pressure on the web server. When a website crashes, it literally falls over and collapses because of the force of all the web traffic.

HOW IT FEELS TO GET DUGG

Anthony Jeffries, a Carolina webmaster whose website features nothing but pictures of hamsters holding up kernels of corn, recently had his site get hit by the “Digg effect.” When asked what it was like, Jeffries replied, “Getting Dugg is like speed-dating 10,000 potential lovers who all turn out to be snoopy and non-committal bastards. Sure the attention is nice, but at the end of it, your site has been trampled, your comments have been spammed, your content has been copy-and-pasted all over the net and all you’ve got to show for it is an inexplicable spike in your web stats for one day in February.”

Obviously, this is not something you want to happen to your website, under any circumstances. The following tips should help you Digg-proof your site.

HOW TO AVOID GETTING DUGG

1. Discuss only obscure topics that nobody really cares about. The fewer people interested in your site, the better. Start thinking about what you can devote your time to that nobody else wants to read about. Here’s some ideas to get you started:
- A blog about novelty Prussian candle molds
- A Greg Kinnear fan site
- A MySpace page about your life

2. Hide your site. Remember, it is not a visitor’s RIGHT to be visiting your site, it is their PRIVILEGE. Make sure you keep your index page called “Untitled document,” and never overtly state what your site is about (keep it a secret for visitors smart enough to figure it out on their own).

3. Embed your entire site’s text in giant image files. The slower it loads, the better. Also, it’s all about Flash intros. People LOVE Flash intros.

4. Remember: typos are everything. Strive to misspell key words, refer to your main subject matter using inconsistent tense, and regularly employ poor grammar – chicks dig poor grammar.

5. Confuse your visitors with absurd filler posts. For instance, if your site is a fascinating consumer-focused insider watchdog blog keeping an eye on gaming, global warming and the adult entertainment industry, it sounds like it might have a little too much appeal. To decrease your site’s attractiveness, it’s a good idea to regularly publish “filler posts” to throw your visitors off. Filler posts are blog entries that contain nothing but phrases like “YAG YAG YAG YAG YAG YAG YAG” over and over again. Using this tactic, you’re bound to throw people off and make sure they never come back.

You might also be curious about how to avoid getting Doug.

HOW TO AVOID GETTING DOUG

Doug is that innocent bystander during your water balloon ambushes that always freaks out whenever he accidentally gets splashed. He always starts yelling, called the cops and that one time, he even removed his shoe and flung it at Derek. Enough is enough. Here are some strategies to help you avoid getting Doug:

- Start a neighbourhood Doug Watch.
- Say to Doug, “Please don’t walk there, we’re throwing water balloons.”
- Install a Doug Sensor on Doug’s pants

But we’ll save the details for next week.