I don’t know whether to laugh or just say “I told you so” after reading the federal indictment against Donald Trump. People who think this is all “political” kind of remind me of Amber Heard stans: the evidence of wrong-doing is staring them right there in front of their faces, yet it’s like trying to shake out that demon inside, but the demon has taken complete control of their minds and soul.
But I’m going to wait until next week to comment on Trump’s current problems, since I have my own problems to contend with, such as being forced to migrate to Google’s new analytical program before Universal Analytics sunsets. They just can’t make it easy, hitting a button and everything is set-up into a “default” mode where you can just change certain functions on your own good time. Right now, I’m afraid I could lose all of the content on this blog by making just one simple mistake in this confusing mess they’ve concocted.
Meanwhile, I have been having problems with attacks from certain “visitors” on my blog site. No, not in the “comments” section, but from something far more “sinister”: the “bot.” According to the website for the malware protection program Kaspersky
A ‘bot’ – short for robot – is a software program that performs automated, repetitive, pre-defined tasks. Bots typically imitate or replace human user behavior. Because they are automated, they operate much faster than human users. They carry out useful functions, such as customer service or indexing search engines, but they can also come in the form of malware – used to gain total control over a computer.
I didn’t realize what was going on at first...
...and "pleasantly" surprised since any “hit” is better than none, especially when it could go from
nothing to 700 in a matter of hours. Last month my "hit" total tripled from the usual monthly total, and only half-way through June its already quadrupled the typical number. Usually if a particular post attracted some little attention it might drive up the number "legitimately," but not like this.
Of course, this “traffic” could be due to web crawlers which actually have a useful purpose, like “indexing” content for use by search engines. I suspect that this is what was happening during that first spike after one of my posts was “flagged” for allegedly violating Google’s “community standards” policy. Soon after the “good” bots finished their work, I was invited to set up a Google Ads account, which may be problematic if it is based on faulty information or hits that Adsense deems "invalid," which you don’t need to upgrade the analytics to know.
I’ve figured this out in the past week, when my “hit” total shot up 8 times more than “normal” and 86 percent of the "new" traffic was coming from Singapore, whereas the previous "spikes" originated in the U.S.; every time I refreshed the data page, a significantly higher number appeared rather than the usual stagnation. The post hits also suggest a certain “randomness” rather than deliberation; I mean, why would anyone in Singapore be interested in an NFL post on football scores during a weekend 10 years ago?
I did some investigating, and apparently Singapore—and that part of the world in general—is a major producer of bots. Many assume that they are up to no good, scanning posts for “personal” information, passwords and access to credit card numbers. According to Techbusiness.com, “bad” bots are
Scrapers, which are bots that are designed to steal content from your site and repost it elsewhere; Spammers, which are bots that are designed to submit spam comments or other forms of unwanted content; Brute force bots, which are bots that are designed to repeatedly try to guess passwords or other login credentials; Click bots, which are bots that are designed to click on ads or other elements of your site in order to generate revenue for the bot owner.
My blog isn’t monetized, nor am I connected to any Google app or program that requires financial transactions, so they can keep up with that if they want. I’ve already had more “hits” from Singapore than I have posts, so why are bot-producers continuing this? Who knows.
Bots might be overlooked if your webpage isn’t set-up to be monetized or contains access to personal information; in fact some people might welcome them, since they artificially inflate your “traffic.” In fact, according to Yahoo, the 2023 Imperva Bad Bot Report “found that in 2022, almost half (47.4%) of all internet traffic came from bots, which is a 5.1% increase year-on-year. At the same time, the proportion of human traffic decreased to 52.6%, which is its lowest level in eight years.”
On Quora someone says that bot traffic can be “good” if the increase in traffic—even the questionable kind—attracts “real” visitors. If you have ads, then additional “clicks” can be had on them even from the “scanning” process, unless Google invalidates them; I mean, who watches those ads on YouTube videos anyways—they're just annoying interruptions (except maybe those T-shirt ads which are actually kind of amusing the first time around), but at least they "count." On the other hand, there is no real “engagement” from bot hits because nobody is actually listening to you, like FedEx customer service.
Blogger doesn’t give you any means of stopping this traffic unless you make a blog “reader only,” and some people think that since most bot traffic is “harmless” it is best to just ignore it. As seen in the above screenshot, this past week has seen the biggest bot “attack” yet, and overnight it passed the four-digit mark for the first time over a 24-hour period, although that appears to have been a last gasp attack as my "hit" number by 2 PM was near zero...
...or maybe it isn't done yet:
But while it lasted, those "big" numbers might not sound like a lot to some people, but with millions of ‘independent” operators like me on the far-fringes of the universe, it’s nice to be “noticed.” I just wonder why it took so long for "bots" to find me, since I started this project in 2010.
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