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 di...
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@jess Brought this issue up on Forem awhile ago, but seems to be fix (question mark?)
Describe the bug
Not seeing a breakdown of external referrers for some posts. In a team discussion, it was suggested that these views may have been from dev.to but miscategorized. Either way, it is unusual for there to be no other referrers.
Expected behavior
A clear breakdown of the different referral sources, such as:
Screenshots
I would raise up in the issues on Forem again since sometimes it is fixed, but later it comes back.
In the issue you mentioned, it's showing "All other external referrers":
But in my case, it's showing "Direct / Unknown":
Is it still the same issue? I read the current issues, but couldn't find a similar one. Maybe there are that many Direct / Unknown visits? From bots perhaps?
Probably similar? Not sure what Direct / Unknown is referring to, but I would bring this up on the Issues on GitHub.
But I am unsure what to say about the issue. We do not have the actual number of Direct / Unknown views, right?
Yes. Try your best to describe what your experiencing. Otherwise, if others have questions, they will let you know!
Yeah. Then I'll open an issue about my original problem - too many Direct / Unknown views. Is that ok?
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.
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.
I suspect ad blockers are to blame. It also depends on how many people actually viewed your article. In my case, I had 842 views from "other," over 2,000 from Google, and another 1,500 from some other source. I think that's normal.
WOW! First time seeing such high numbers! So we can see it in that much detail? I didn't know that so many people on DEV use ad blockers.
Maybe Google's crawler
Is it similar in your posts as well?
yes
For the first time the graph is flipped!