It began with a surprising increase in traffic. September hit 3,000 views, October 4.5 thousand. In the 18 year history of the blog, the monthly average number of views has rarely touched 1,000, and November is already at 9,000, not quite half way through the month.
“Something was happening to Becky Driscoll.”1
The blog stats were being invaded by bots, scrapers and spam bots, almost all from one country, a crawling activity. Why? To collect data, copy text, or probe for vulnerabilities? The bots don’t actually read, click, or loiter. Stats counts them as views because they look like ordinary visitors loading pages, but there’s no real human engagement. Bot is short for robot, but today simply suggests a tirelessly, endlessly automated worker specialized in tasking repetitively without meaning.
Along with the bots came an influx of followers. Simply put, Stats were absurdly inflated and the number of followers a misleading count. A bit of research found the bots posed no significant risk, but they are annoying and pretty much render Stats meaningless, or at least difficult and time consuming to understand. The spam followers featured a kind of spooky presence. What to do?
Try Google Analytics, where it’s possible to filter out unwanted activity from Stats. Still in test mode, but not sure the filter’s working. But even if it works and excludes the bots, that simply means the bots are not being counted; it doesn’t stop the bots from crawling through the site, like neutrinos passing through your body. What else might hold back the bots?
Disallow likes and comments, possible spam entry points. But without likes and comments, and given the unreliability of Stats, one has lost all meaningful information for determining engagement. So turn comments back on, but require users login to comment. Keep the site minimal. To this end, convert the Seedlet theme, which is minimal and was working fine but relied on the classic editor, to something newer that uses the block editor and possibly benefits from more attention and up-to-date programming. So converted to the Twenty Twenty-Five theme, which seems to be working well.
The conversion of the old theme to the newer one was quick and easy. Learning curve not too steep, fun messing around with greater control and more options over things like fonts and text and being able to make changes specific to certain sections or applied to the whole site at once. Still playing around with options. The change did result in a few glitches that probably no one will notice, things that might have been fixed but were not, like the font size in the oldest posts, which still don’t conform to the current selection, or the position of photos in wrapped text, again mostly in older posts, but overall the site seems to be working as designed, effective in its minimalist intent, but if a real viewer sees something is looking unintentionally weird, maybe they’ll leave a comment?
- Jack Finney, “The Body Snatchers,” 1955, serialized in Colliers Weekly in November and December 1954. “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” is the 1956 film based on Finney’s novel. ↩︎
The Coming of the Toads 