This is the traffic sources graph for a post I created a few hours ago:
It's not just this post. Every single one of my posts is dominated by direct/unknown sources. Is it like that for everyone else in here? Or is it just me? It doesn't make any sense at all.
Top comments (16)
Yeah, I saw that a few months ago. It gets even weirder when you look at followers, read times, etc. ALOT of Dev.to traffic is bots. For what purpose? Probably data mining for AI training? So dont pay much mind to the stats, it's the same reason why you wake up 1 day and suddenly get 200+ new followers, but when you look at their profiles, most are just generic shells, no comments, no posts, not even a bio.
Actually 1 of the reasons why I made DevGuard, they havent implemented it yet, but it's essentially an anti-bot system (I had some experience bypassing WAF with MCP-Lite, so I used that as the basis of how to flag a bot), that counts for profiles, readers, comments, everything. Cuz it's traffic that they pay for, people think that hosting a server is all it takes, but you pay for network use too and the bots likely account for a serious amount of traffic...
So, that's probably the reason behind the many followers on my profile who haven't read a single one of my posts? I have also got a few purely promotional comments that have nothing to do with my post. Fortunately, they were automatically removed. But I still got the notification.
Yip. It is unfortunate, 99% of them woulda been filtered out if they used cloudflare proxying, but it is what it is. That's why readers and readtimes cant be trusted, so best option is run on engagement to judge (comments and likes). The bots have no reason to like or comment and the bot comments are (mostly) filtered out.
Yeah. It's quite good at filtering comments. But it has many false positives. But that's ok, it works.
You mean devguard.org? Or something else?
Nope, this: github.com/UnitBuilds-CC/DEV.to-De...
Update: It's quite different for this post:
Maybe the bots aren't crawling because it's about them? 😂
My weekly analytics. 100+ readers today, but average read time is 30s, it takes more than 30s to read, so chances are it's scale of 10, 10x longer read times average, but 10x fewer readers, the rest are bots.
What?? And they haven't found a solution to this?
Well it's a bit more complicated unfortunately, Forem has limited people who review and implement the PRs, so while I made a solution for them months ago, they just dont have the manpower to go through 5k+ lines of code to verify whether it's safe or not to implement. Unfortunately, it's not something that can just be 'hot-patched', because they currently dont expose enough to actually do a good job at it. Hence DevGuard uses browser identity to determine if it's a playwright browser, etc. Not the kinda stuff they'd have any real knowledge about auditing, even though it's essentially how DataDome does their WAF. Further than that, a few bots are preferred over losing a single real person, which is the other end of the stick. They've been trying a system that ended up flagging anyone posting links as bots, which they seem to have fixed now, but it's a mess to figure it all out and I dont blame them for taking their time, cuz it's not an easy task staying ahead of bots.
Yeah. That's also correct. It flagged me as a bot for including a link in a comment. I guess it no longer does that.
That's why it's so important to report bugs, it's a hassle... But it allows them to address it directly, because the more evidence you can give them (assumptions are great too!), they have more to work with to uncover what's breaking behind the scenes and how to fix it.
Maybe Google's crawler
Is it similar in your posts as well?
yes