I haven't been blogging about news and current events for a long time now—over a month, and I dropped the political stuff around the same time I started up with Substack. I would have thought that the bots afflicting my blog would have gone away by now with no fresh meat left to feed on, but no—I still get tens of thousands of hits per day. Either these are real people, which I doubt, or they're just bots that don't know when to quit, like flies buzzing around the still-rotting bones of a corpse. I finished September with 893,233 unique visits. September 30 alone, the final day of September, was a 35,811-visit day. Today, a bit more than halfway through the site meter's 24-period for what it considers October 1, I already have 14,465 unique visits, which means I'll have over 20K visits by 9 a.m. tomorrow, maybe over 30K if I'm "lucky." I would love to believe these visits are all from real people, but they can't be because I never have enough comments to justify the number. True, even on blogs that get ten times more visits than I do, there's usually just a clique of regular commenters. Even so, I have at most one or two semi-regular commenters, two or three more irregular commenters, and only a random smattering of commenters who stroll in, engage once, and just disappear. What's that all about? Of course, half of those randos are people who pop in with something rude to say, so their comments never see the light of day. Oh, well.
So I think my blog is still weighed down by bots covering its entire body in the same day our poor family dog spent its final day on earth covered in flies as it stood there, blindly staring my way and looking utterly pathetic. The flies obviously knew what was up.
Anyway, if anyone has an explanation for "bot retention" (come to think of it, I haven't checked my Google Analytics stats in a couple of months), feel free to give it in the comments. Maybe the bots are attracted to how much the blog sucks. Wouldn't that be a superpower?
Are all those rude comments stored somewhere, or have they been flushed into the ether? Because I think it would be funny to do a whole post where you bring the rude comments to light and then dunk on them.
ReplyDeleteIn the ether, alas. The whole point is not to give these bozos the time of day. In the cosmic scheme, the rude ones are fairly rare (maybe 2-3 per year), but on occasion, one of the assholes will be the obsessive type to leave comment after comment until it gets through even his thick skull that no response is forthcoming.
DeleteI read you every day and I'm a real human being.
ReplyDeleteThank you. You're one of my five readers.
DeleteWell, bots never swarm my blog, and LTG is the champion for suckiness, so that can't be what's happening.
ReplyDeleteIt may be that blogspot as a website inherently gets lots and lots of bots. I don't know how web crawlers work, but I would think that a well established web address will attract more spam.
ReplyDeleteUnique web addresses, like John's, just don't show up on their radar. I have a unique web address, and have never actually published anything. Still gets about 500 visits per day, which most certainly are all bots.
Brian
So, you're popular with the creatures, too.
Delete