Anyone else had a sudden and massive rise in visitors and views?
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Hmm, I can’t help but think this is more spam, but that may just be because I have no idea what Magic Brawl APK is (nor will I bother finding out).
Why do I say that? Because I specifically said the surge (still ongoing, averaging 1,100 visits a day for nine days) came at a time I wasn’t posting anything because I was sick.There is no rhyme or reason I can think of anything I did being the trigger. Then again, lots of people get triggered for no reason, so why not bots, eh?
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Thanks for the clarification! My previous comment wasn’t intended as spam — I mentioned Magic Brawl APK simply because it’s the area I usually write about. I understand it might look unfamiliar on your end.
Your traffic spike really does sound like bot activity or a random search fluctuation, especially since it happened while you weren’t posting. These things happen unexpectedly sometimes.
Hope you’re feeling better now! -
Hi, justjennifer . . . I removed those when my posts started disappearing, thinking that maybe that might be the cause. I didn’t bother putting them back. Sorry about that.
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Thanks, grayliam505. I didn’t mean to impugn you or to paint you with the spammer brush. I was just wondering aloud, as the other comment (now removed) was definitely spam.
I did look up Magic Brawl after the fact (not a gamer, am I), but (to my knowledge) there’s no method provided to edit these comments/replies after they are posted.Again, my apologies.
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Final update (other than I might add a comment if booming stats ever stops):
This has now exceeded my capacity to maintain interest. I’m on the 10th booming day, with yesterday being a banner day (over 1.7K visits).
Basically, I’ll stop caring about stats (not that I cared much before). Additionally, this will likely subside at some point, and even if it doesn’t, I won’t lose sleep over it (there are more important things that already accomplish that, like finding a decent place to get malasadas).
As a potential positive, if all this scrubbing is being used to train some AI or other, I look forward to finally interacting with an AI as intelligent, thoughtful, principled, empathetic, honest, and all-around good soul as I am.
Well, I’m souless, but you know what I mean. Hey! . . . come to think of it, so are AIs! . . . maybe there’s some hope for them after all.
ttfn
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@disperser, hey there. Thanks for all the info you shared here, and it would be terrible if we get to a point where we can’t trust stats anymore.
I checked your site and I see how absurd the numbers are, so I’d like to ask you to give one setting a try: “Prevent third-party sharing“, under Settings > Reading. This could help restrict your site’s content from AI training and third-party use, and we explain more about it here:
By setting your site to public, everyone on the internet can see it (including search engines). This guide will show you how to publish your website and make it public. In this guideVideo tutorialPublish your websiteDiscourage search enginesPrevent third-party sharing Have a question? Ask our AI assistant Back to top Video tutorial PuCould you please give this one a try and let us know if it helps mitigate part of this issue? I know we’ve already discussed a few ideas by email, but I don’t think this setting was attempted so far.
Thank you!
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Finally, someone agrees, “how absurd the numbers are”!
However, I contend this next particular ship has sailed:
“… it would be terrible if we get to a point where we can’t trust stats anymore.”Given I’ve had more than 25K views and 22K “visits” in the last three weeks, we should be able to agree the stats are trashed, worthless, gowno, drek, kak, caca, sranje, merda, hovno, merde, tae, jama, scheisse, stercore, paru, rahat, lapoa, sranje, bok, cachu, and (of course) 拉屎.
But, for the sake of science, I made the suggested change at 4:00pm local time. The hourly rate today was averaging about 80views/visits per hour. I’ll see if the change affects the hourly rate.
Thank you.
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OK, since the change, I’m still seeing 80-90 views/visits per hour.
It does not appear the change has done anything to stop these pesky bots that seem to defy the filters of multiple stat counters.
Thanks for trying.
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I too gave it a try and it did nothing, my hits from China are only escalating. Over 14,000 so far this year, almost all in the past two months. Last year from China I had 74, not even on my radar at all, now it’s second to the US. My stats are completely fried. Five years of tracking them turns out to be a complete waste of time. Twice now I have been given suggestions by WP that do not help. While I appreciate the suggestion this was a third failure. One suggestion from WP help was that I just ignore my stats. Wow, there’s someone who really knows their membership well.
I, like Disperser, and some of my friends with the same issue have been told if we upgrade to the Business Plan there’s a plugin that can help. So if I pay WP another $336 dollars a year for a plan I will not use, at all. But to fix one issue, that is clearly fixable by WP. This is a great way to treat members, I feel so valued. For gods sake either fix the problem or give me the ability to do something about it myself. WP has me backed into a corner. I found that if I use Cloudflare, I can control it. But no I can’t use Cloudflare, wait for it, unless I have a business plan for $33 a month!
So you can take back the message you sent me earlier this year to congratulate me on 100,000 pageviews. At this rate China will pass that very soon.
Regards, one very deflated WP blogger.
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Hi @disperser! Thank you for testing that setting. We’ll continue to investigate this issue internally, but in the meantime, you can use a third-party plugin to restrict visits based on the geographic location of the visitors. An example of such plugin is https://wordpress.com/plugins/ip-location-block/
@randydafoe I’ve emailed you with more information about your site. Please look for the email in your mailbox. I’ll keep an eye on that email thread for your response.
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@Staff-webwizard, thanks for the link.
Unfortunately, you might not be aware that the plan I’m on (the NON-Business Plan) does not allow plugin installation. Or has that recently changed?
You might also not know that, on principle, I resist paying the predatory $50/year cost to increase my storage by a paltry amount, so I’m certainly not going to triple my yearly blog costs to get a plan for which I have no practical use just to add a plugin to restrict bots WordPress is supposed to be blocking in the first place.
At this point, I’m thrilled watching my daily stats show numbers that might make WordAds worthwhile . . . Oh, wait . . . WP, in fact, can differentiate between real visitors and bots when it comes to paying me money. Huh!
Seriously, I am glad you are looking into it. I find the support staff very helpful, if sometimes naive in thinking WP (Anthropic) is not like other corporations (hint: greedy and… no, just greedy).
I appreciate you taking an interest in this, but really, despite what JetPack wants to tell me, I don’t see any insight I can glean from my stats. Even if this gets fixed, I might get useful information on the four or five people who regularly visit, but my all-time stats will still be worthless.
Much like my ~2K subscribers, the numbers are meaningless.
Although I secretly still hope that the surge is due to people who love my blog (I imagine a Disperser Fan Club spreading around the globe), hang on my every word, but who lack hands to type on the keyboard they lost or click the mouse that no longer works.
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Hi @disperser! You can install plugins under our current plan. I’ve emailed you more details. Please respond to that email if you have any questions!
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Odd . . . whenever I’ve tried, I’m told (including by support staff) that I would need to upgrade to the Business Plan.
Ah . . . that changed on September 8th.
Interesting.
Still, are you familiar with the saying, “better ten guilty men go free than an innocent man be hanged?”
I did have some regular readers from China, as well as some of the other countries, that showed surges these past two weeks. I’m happy to wait for either China et. al. to tire of reading my blog, or WP to solve this issue (I assume this isn’t something WP wants to brag about, “Hey! Get thousands of visits a day from bots!”), because China is not the only one with bots.Plus, that plugin still says “Free for Business Plan”, making me think there may be a charge involved (or they haven’t updated their page).
Regardless, I applaud and appreciate your efforts, but for now, I’m fine as I am as I wait for a more permanent and elegant solution than me applying a patch.
Thank you.
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Interesting @staff-webwizard It was my understanding that only sites upgrading from Free to Premium or Personal would now have access to plugins/themes. My site at wpcommaven is currently on the Premium plan, but when accessing the Plugin page, I’m also prompted to upgrade to Business. Dreaming of the day when existing Personal and Premium plans can add Plugins as well.
@disperser I’ve removed all the now superfluous tags since it looks like the issues with spammers and your disappeared replies are resolved. Cheers!
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Hi @disperser! I totally understand. Since the surge in bot traffic is recent, we can enable defensive mode on your site for a limited time (for example, 7 days). Defensive mode adds an extra layer of security and will present a challenge to some visitors, so they need to do something to prove they are legitimate human visitors.
In some cases, enabling defensive mode for some time makes the bots “give up”, and they don’t return after you turn it off.
If you would like me to enable it for the next 7 days, let me know.
Also, rest assured you won’t be charged for installing plugins in your Premium plan site. If you need help with that, please reply to the email I sent you, and I’ll be happy to help you there (it’s better to continue over email so we keep this thread on topic).
Hi @justjennifer! I’ve emailed you.
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No temporary defensive mode.
It is mucho grande aggravating having to sign in to leave a Like or a Comment (I know, because it happens to me all the time, even though I am signed in on another tab), and it would be even more so to just visit a site.
Besides, as mentioned, I’m no longer bothered about the stats . . . I mean, trash stats. I’m actually curious about how long it will take to reach 1M visitors. It took me 15 years to get 300K visitors. Now, only about two weeks to add 27K more.
At this rate, I’m looking at 1M in three more years? Is there an award for 1M? If not, there should be.
Anyway, back to the plugin . . . as I mentioned, I’d rather WP get its act together and start blocking bots again, rather than me adding something that might irritate the few visitors I have.
Honestly, I appreciate you wanting to solve this issue by other means — and I thank you for it — but I don’t like Band-Aids or duct tape fixes. WP is supposed to — or so I’ve been told — not count bots.
If the current environment is such that WP can’t, because bots got better at sneaking through, so be it. I’ll just ignore stats and go on with my blogging life.
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We’re glad to hear this hasn’t deterred you from blogging! What you’re seeing is, sadly, part of having a public site on the open web: anyone can load your pages, including bots and spammy traffic. No one can completely stop that, because a public URL is open to all.
We are always working to cut this down, though. Like every web host, it’s an ongoing arms race with spammers: we block one method, they try another, we adjust again, and so on. On WordPress.com we use Akismet, a dedicated spam‑prevention system and team, to keep updating our filters based on what we see across millions of sites.
We know this kind of traffic makes your stats feel less useful, and that’s frustrating. Your reports help us keep improving how we handle it, so thank you!
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~~ @staff-webwizard
Hey @staff-brock In case staff may have not seen this, there have been a number of site owner forum reports about the sudden unexplained increase in site visits
WordPress.com Forums 