Drawing Chinese Bot Interest
If you can read it, on the right this excerpt from my traffic report shows visit after visit coming from the same source in Beijing, China.
From time to time I go all meta on this blog, which is to say, instead of writing about motorcycles on the blog I write about the blog. “Meta” basically means self-referential. I learned the term when I was writing software user guides and there was this constant mention of “metadata.” Metadata, it turns out, is data about the data. Self-referential.
I’ve done this a few times, particularly a number of years ago when someone hacked the site and played all kind of mischief.
This time it’s not damage but a curious situation. Apparently somebody in China has a bot (I assume it’s a bot, no one would do this in person) has gone through the entire site–especially this blog–visiting every single page.
I first noticed it about a month ago when I went to check my visitor statistics and found that the number had shot through the roof. In the previous month there were a reported 1,537 visitors and then the next month that number stood at 8,351. I gasped and drilled down. And what I found is like what you see above in that screen shot: thousands and thousands of one-page visits all from one source in Beijing.
The way I figure it, some company in China is scraping all my content, probably for use in training an artificial intelligence tool. Intellectual theft as it were. Everything here is copyrighted but nobody is asking my permission or paying me for it.
I had figured that this was a one-shot affair but it seems to be continuing. Yesterday’s traffic was more than 50 percent from this bot. It’s not like it’s costing me something out of pocket but it screws up my stats. I have kept stats on this site ever since I launched it and now my traffic numbers are just garbage. I don’t see that there’s a thing in the world I can do about it so I just hope they get what they want and then leave for good and let me get back to normal.
Biker Quote for Today
Ride now; beer later.
Tags: bots scour website
