Out, damned bot! out, I say! — One: two: why,
Then, ’tis time they do’t. — Internet is murky! — Fie, my
Lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
Fear who knows it, when none can call their power to
Account? — Yet who would have thought the old bots
To have had so much data in them.
— Lady MacCryptoSpam, MacBot
So this website has been up — er, kinda back up, I suppose, in a sense — since Nov. 4. Over the course of two weeks or so, I’ve had some 360 visitors making some 640 visits from China and Russia to Viet Nam and Thailand, among others — not to mention the good ole’ United States, which still contains the lion’s share.
Most of them, if not all of them — so far — have been bots.
The two visits I’m somewhat sure of — well, possibly, anyway — are the ones that came here looking for the geckosbark.com and blog.jeffchappell.com, respectively. … Actually, no, the more I think about it those are probably bots too; I don’t know of anyone in Camden, NJ, much less anyone that follows my erstwhile blogs, after all.
Then there were a few visits from Ashburn, VA who were sent here from Google while searching for the words “And We’re Back;” those were probably from an actual flesh-and-blood person … perhaps.
Edit: Nope, pretty sure that was a bot as well. When I checked my stats this afternoon, there were exactly three more hits from the same IP address, coming here from Google while searching the term “bot-ylicious.” As I just made this word up last night, pretty sure that’s bot behavior, as opposed to a human being.
Of course I wasn’t the first to think of the term — a quick search of Google reveals pages containing the word “botylicious” (no doubt more that a few of them typos; shout out to Destiny’s Child), but only a few containing the hyphenated term “bot-ylicious” as spelled above. And my page — this page — doesn’t show up yet, alas.
So yeah, bot.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program, already in progress.
… And before someone gets their knickers in a twist, I refer you to my GDPR-compliant privacy policy.
Lets Get Our Nerd On
Two-thirds of traffic on the Interwebs are bots now — and that’s just the bad bots — so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. On my old site, which had been around for years, I got a lot of traffic, but the ratio of bots to real people was at least two out of every three — at the very least, I’m guessing.
What prompted this epistle today was Saturday’s visits vs. visitors chart in WP Statistics; usually visits track visitors fairly closely, at the moment. Here at the dawn of Wondering Whilst Wondering — it has only been a little over two weeks — you’ll get a few people (or bots) who bother to drill down a page or three, prompting visits to be slightly higher than the number of visitors, but not too much. That will change (I hope) once I get this site/domain re-established, but for now visits track visitors pretty closely.
Until Saturday, that is. Suddenly, visits show hockey-stick growth — 23 visitors compared to 167 visits. It turns out 140 of those visits/hits came from two different visitors in Viet Nam; a vast majority of those hits (if not all) were just bounces off the homepage. If you need more evidence of a bot(s), the referrer isn’t Google or Baidu or even Duck Duck Go but yours truly, jeffchappell.com.
So there you go. I’d even perhaps go so far to say that this wasn’t a relatively benign bot, say a crypto bot from Binance (I’ve seen a few of those already) or some such, but rather one of those bad bots flying the Jolly Roger sniffing around for an opening. On the other hand, I’m no cyber security expert, so who knows, really.
By the way, if you want to learn more about bots, check that out.
Coming Soon
I’ll have my first new story up on Patreon and By Me a Coffee (BMAC) at the end of the month, complete with an ebook version (even though there won’t be any people on their yet, heh), so be on the look out for that. At the end of December I’ll have yet another new story for Patreon/BMAC, and that first new story will then be posted here.
And so on and so forth. …
In the meantime I’ve got an interesting book vs. the movie comparison of Christine, by Stephen King. Why? Just ’cause. Seems I never actually read Christine, so I remedied that; then I had to see the movie — you see where this is going, don’t you?
Postscript: Props to The Bard, of course.