The rise of the bots

Many years ago I attached a hit counter to this blog in order to track how many people visisted. Self aggrandisement in other words. Over the years my interest in it has waned, I vaguely recall 1 million, I have no recollection of 2 million or anything beyond that. All I know is that I write posts about my holidays and birding trips that sink into a deep, black hole from which they never re-emerge. The other day, bemoaning yet another wasted half hour, I noticed that the post in question had been read by 60 or so people, meh, but that the "day count" was in excess of 10,000. Not only that, but the historic day count was also at this level and even beyond. Huh?

I've written - since inception - around 2,500 posts. That's actually quite a lot when you think about it, especially as I generally have nothing whatsoever to say for months on end. But ten thousand views a day makes no sense at all. Every single post would need to be viewed four times day, every day. And allegedly this has been happening for weeks and months.

I sense a bot. Many bots. Anyhow, it is nice of the machines to be concerned about my self esteem - look!

The formatting is a bit suspect, but as someone who works with numbers every day I can tell you that this is just over five million hits. Wow. I must be amazing. I have no idea how this happens, but you can track it (if you are on a computer rather than a phone) somewhere on the right hand side of the page down the bottom. Looking back at the rudimentary things that Google provides in the background I can see that up until about September 2025 it was chugging along perfectly normally. Then something happened, and since then there has been steady increase of alleged views month on month, culminating in a whopping 370,000 in April of this year. The same April in which I published six posts, most of them about a trip to Arizona which - if the stats are to be believed - were viewed on average 250 times each. 1,500 vs 370,000. Right.

Can anyone explain this. Does anyone give a toss? I am actually a bit irritated that any hope I might have of understanding exactly who visits are completely obscured by this. Not that I care all that much, but you know how it is. Mirror mirror on the wall....

Most of my visitors come from Vietnam and Iraq. Of course they do. I tailor my blog specificaly to appeal to readers from these countries, just as I do for my legions of loyal fans in Bangladesh, Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. 

Honestly, what a joke. The only hint at what might be happening is given by the bottom line in the referring URLs section. A recent date showed that Google.com was responsible for 41 visits, and the blog itself (as I frequently link to old posts plus the history is down the right hand side) delivered 53. Meanwhile "Other" delivered 96k. Nice. No other information about "Other" is available, but I reckon he might be called Claude.

EDIT: 19 people have read this post at the time of this edit. 10,697 "people" visited the blog today.