If so, could you leave a brief comment – just a yes, maybe, thank you, sure, whatever? You do have to register to comment – because without requiring registration, comment spammers quickly fill up the comments.
The blog is hammered by wordpress scrapers that steal content and repurpose for something else. One scraper made over 45,000 page requests in the past couple of days, which not only steals content but also slows down access to this web site.
I am currently experimenting with configuration options to reduce the impact of the scrapers.
I write this blog more as a place for personal notes than anything else. I do not run ads nor am trying to earn money off this. While there are obvious humans reading these posts, most of the visits appear to be from bots – including search engines, “brand watch” monitoring systems, but especially from scrapers. Scrapers steal content, then re-package it on their own web sites, with advertising. They steal so much content that just making a few cents on ads for each bit they’ve stolen adds up to real money considering they are fleecing much of the Internet.
Update – I have made a number of changes that appear to have greatly reduced the impact of the scrapers. One of them was accessing thousands of items every day, and hammering the site with excess requests. I will not say what I’ve done to curtail the bots – but have achieved some success. I do not wish to say what I did as they would likely then make changes to evade the actions I took.
