The Darts Conundrum

It seems even this website itself isn’t immune to random happenings.

I decided to take a look at my site’s stats to see how many reads I was getting on recent posts. One of the stats tells me how many people Share from the site – that is clicking one of the buttons on the posts themselves to share, rather than sharing my Facebook post. Most of the numbers were probably me testing, but I found something strange:

The top one is the Facebook buttons, then the Twitter buttons, then the second last is my LinkedIn buttons, and then the simple Mail link.

The one in the middle confused me, I don’t have any links to The Sun’s website on my blog; how would people be clicking this? I wondered what it was so I clicked it. This is what it links to:

What the fuck is this? Why is there a link to a picture of a darts player being reported on my site? Is this the mascot for some kind of radical, beer-swilling, pub-frequenting anarchist hacker group. Is this a common thing on the internet these days? “Hey guys did you hear the Pentagon’s website got Bristowed the other day, just after a coordinated Jockying took out the Visa and MasterCard websites.”

Is this an internet meme I have missed? Am I supposed to react to this by adding some text onto it, and reposting it to some other site?

I get a lot of spam on this site, which thankfully never makes it through to the live site anymore, but did this guy’s sponsors think they could make a bit more publicity by planting his image, and his shirt, over random websites.

I’m baffled. All my technical know-how has deserted me. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with this information or how to prevent other darts players from appearing in outbound links stats on my site. Maybe it won’t stop at darts players, maybe Steve Davis will be next, or Ian Botham.

These are unsettling and uncertain times.

PS – I have linked the picture above through to The Sun’s website, so if anyone clicks it, the stats on this darts player link will increase – I figured I might as well roll with it. Let’s see how many hits he gets.

PPS – UPDATE – conundrum solved. Someone posted it in a comment on an old post. Oh well, I still like the idea of a website being Bristowed.