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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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?
Maybe Google's crawler
Is it similar in your posts as well?
yes