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morihofi

@leah For me, an individual who runs a small private website, this is true. 50% - 60% of the traffic on my website comes from bots in an average month.

12 comments
tsia

@morihofi @leah I would like to compare my request logs. How are you measuring this? Some sort of user agent list?

Darrin West

@morihofi @leah @tsia_ We might crowd source detection by sharing (trimmed) logs somewhere. Seeing IPs and ids repeated across zillions of websites is a pretty good fingerprint of a bad actor. If all that were automated, the results could be auto added to block lists.

Leah (Cloudstylistin)

@obviousdwest @morihofi @tsia_ there are a lot of providers offering such services and I would prefer to fix the source of the peoblem and not the symptoms.

morihofi

@leah @obviousdwest @tsia_ I just discovered in my Matomo analytics that some traffic came from clients with a referer to xtraffic.plus. Some sort of traffic generator for SEO optimisation (How even should that work)

tsia

@morihofi @leah @obviousdwest (knowing some of those SEO people I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t work at all)

Werawelt

@morihofi @leah

Maybe: couldn't you reduce the number of hits per minute and block the IP for a certain period of time? In WP, for example, you can do this with Wordfence

Leah (Cloudstylistin)

@werawelt @morihofi thats only fixing the symptoms not the problem.

maybit

@leah @werawelt @morihofi
agree also, but fixing the problem, while it is something I'd like to see happen or even contribute to, is not something actionable which would relieve the anxiety* I feel reading about this

* light anxiety level, no need for a CW, I'm just expressing my feelings

mirabilos

@werawelt @morihofi @leah nah, typical visitors do bursts (page, CSS, fonts, images, js), so you’d hurt them too much

.oO(maybe one could just block all “cloud” services, since they don’t list their customers’ actual ranges in WHOIS and change them too often anyway… if enough people did this, maybe we could get good IP subnet to customer mapping in WHOIS…)

Earth Notes

@morihofi @leah >50% of my traffic has been non-human for a long time, though that has included search engine spiders etc. I have a target of keeping them to < 50%. See top line in table.

earth.org.uk/note-on-site-tech

The AI bots are a huge slice added to that.

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