Someone told me that if bots keep landing on my articles, it means I'm "fresh content" for them.
I'm 53. I've spent my life working in a warehouse and on machines. The only fresh thing around here is my patience, and it's leaving fast.
In my part of Italy we have a saying for situations like this: "Le mazzate ci vo!" Roughly: what this needs is a good beating. Here's why I've been saying it a lot lately.
The illusion of numbers
I build BeeEngine, a zero-dependency 2D game engine in vanilla JavaScript, and I write docs and posts about it.
So I open my analytics and think: wow, 100 visits from California, 50 from New York!
Then I dig a little. Zero-second sessions. Datacenter cities like Ashburn and Mountain View. Not a single human being. Just machines talking to machines.
Then came the comments
This week two comments showed up under my posts. Long, polite, full of words like "double-buffered draw lists", "GPU batching", "ECS queries".
Sounds smart. Except my engine is single-threaded Canvas 2D: there is no GPU batch and no ECS to query. The comments were answering a post I didn't write.
The pattern was always the same:
- a random username, like
ywnigcsmku2m - an account created a few days earlier, with a bio that says "404 bio not found"
- comments on a dozen unrelated articles on the same day, in several languages
- and, at the very end, a small "(site: ...)" with a link
That last line is the whole point. Everything else is packaging.
A few hours later I found my own article copied on an aggregator site, wrapped in a "create an account" popup.
Not all bots are the same
To be fair, a bot is just a script doing a repetitive job faster than any human. They come in different flavors:
The useful ones. Googlebot, Bingbot. They read your HTML, follow links and tell search engines your page exists. Without them nobody finds you.
The collectors. AI crawlers and scrapers. They harvest code, docs and tutorials to train models or to build mirror sites that catch traffic on the side.
The spammers. Fake profiles that use AI to write plausible technical comments and plant a link, hoping someone clicks or that search engines pass them some authority.
Why us?
At first I thought: they're targeting me, maybe because I'm small and not "authoritative".
No. They don't pick anyone. They follow fresh, well-indexed content with technical tags: javascript, gamedev, canvas, webdev. A post about sprite sheets or particle pools is exactly what they're looking for.
So, strangely, bots showing up is a side effect of being visible. It doesn't feel like a compliment, though.
What I actually want
I don't need 500 fake sessions. I need:
- people who actually try the library
- a star or a real issue on GitHub
- honest feedback from someone building an HTML5 game
Ghost traffic just dirties the stats and makes it harder to know if things are going well.
What I do now
- Don't click the links in suspicious comments.
- Check the profile: brand-new account, random name, comments everywhere on the same day.
- Report it on DEV (the three dots on the comment, then "Report abuse") and hide the comment on your own post.
- Don't reply to bots. Do reply to real people, they're the reason you write.
- Filter analytics by excluding datacenter traffic and zero-second sessions before celebrating any spike.
- Set a canonical URL on cross-posted articles, so search engines know which copy is the original.
Conclusion
As long as we publish openly on the web, bots will be around. We can't give them the beating they deserve, so we unmask them one comment at a time and keep writing real code for real humans.
Le mazzate ci vo!
Have you had fake comments or ghost traffic on your posts? How do you deal with them? Real humans only in the comments, please. 😄
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