Weird Statistics
I got one of these earlier today.
It hasn’t really been a ‘spike’ because it’s carried on all day. As of now (about 10pm local Irish time), I’ve had over 7,000 hits today. That’s a lot more than average!
The weird thing is that the traffic isn’t all arriving at the same post, so I’ve no idea what triggered this surge. All I know is that most of the readers are based in the USA.
It’s a mystery!
Another interesting thing is that all those hits are coming from just a few hundred unique visitors. It could, therefore, be that all the extra traffic is from one site, in which case it might be someone scraping the content for AI purposes…
Update: the blitz lasted three days. Notice how the number of visitors did not go up, only the number of reads.
In the Dark 
November 20, 2024 at 3:00 pm
Some AI bot will sound a lot like you in a forthcoming iteration. University management may be worried.
March 21, 2025 at 9:14 am
[…] In a similar vein, when I started writing this blog back in 2008 I did wonder about copyright. Over the years, quite a lot of my ramblings here have been lifted by journalists, etc. Again a bit of courtesy would have been nice. I did make the decision, however, not to bother about this as (a) it would be too much hassle to chase down every plagiarist and (b) I don’t make money from this site anyway. As far as I’m concerned as soon as I put anything on here it is in the public domain. I haven’t changed that opinion with the advent of ChatGPT etc. Indeed, I am pretty sure that all 7000+ articles from this blog were systematically scraped last year. […]