Mystery Site Visits

On maybe a dozen different occasions since using Clicky (had no web analytics before that) I've had repeated site visits linked to what I assume are automated programs. Usually they are to my homepage, usually they are for the miminum 10s; they have originated in Canada, the U.S., Russia, and most recently Germany. They may last for a few days or go on for weeks. The wildcard filter has been a considerable help in blocking some of these nuisance visits, since the final set in the IP string often changes. Recently I've been getting hit around 10 times daily by visits to my Contact page (!) from Bonn, Germany, and the last two IP sets keep changing, so the wildcard option has not helped. I've also begun to get nuisance visits via third-party intermediaries (about.com and facebook) which are impossible to block. What I'm wondering is, what can possibly be the motive of the parties behind this sort of thing? It certainly isn't the mischief of commercial competitors because my site is purely informational. Are they Clicky haters? :-) Any insight appreciated.

Yeah those do look like bots. I'm not sure what they are doing though, you can never tell why they're on your site. I doubt it's malicious or trying to "trick" Clicky (otherwise it would be a much more widespread problem), but I don't really have any ideas for you, sorry.

They could be sent from a competitor. Trying to mess with your stats.

I doubt it, otherwise I'd be hearing about this problem a lot more often. This is the only case of it so far.

I to have this problem. It's becoming annoying. Is there anyway we could set a filter for let say:
Russian Federation >10s visits. I haven't found a way to do this...

I have been getting a problem with some visitors from Australia 10k requests per hour on the same content via Spy and really playing with stats, therefore I removed them from the network. On Ubuntu servers:

sudo iptables -I INPUT -s 15.64.180.183 -j DROP
sudo iptables -I OUTPUT -d 15.64.180.183 -j DROP

I would look at blocking them server side. Then script/application side. Then also Clicky side - filter there name as "spam" you can then ignore all users under that names; example bots.