It seems awfully unlikely…
Sometime within a couple hours of when I posted my comment that we hadn't seen the traffic spike I expected, someone (presumably a bot) started poking our stats-collector once a minute, and has kept it up all day. Thus, our stats for the day show something like double normal traffic, with no end in sight. This would be gratifying if it were real, but it's obviously not, which just makes it annoying—it makes it a lot harder to believe in the validity of the Nedstat stats. (Granted, there's no real validity to be had there anyway; what Nedstat measures doesn't correlate in any meaningful way with Number Of Readers, the numerical holy grail that no online magazine can actually measure. But if Nedstat has consistent input over time, we can at least make guesses about whether our readership is going up or not, and some rough idea of how fast. Oh, well, I guess this week will be one of those anomalies that we have to ignore.)
So anyway, it seems very unlikely that some well-meaning reader saw my note and decided to "help," but I figured it couldn't hurt to mention publicly that we'd sure appreciate it if this would stop.
(This posting is pretty much the equivalent of noticing that one's wish for the rain to stop has coincidentally come true, and thus cautiously making another wish just on the off chance that it wasn't a coincidence. Can't hurt, might help, even though very unlikely.)
In other news, here at the end of what's become a 12-hour work day (though to be fair only about 9 to 10 of those hours involved actual work), it's time for me to go home and have dinner and do some magazine reading 'til I fall asleep.
I'm just about caught up, in terms of work, to where I should have been about a week ago. Sigh.