The last year has seen an insane increase in bot traffic to China to my sites. Every year, I kept looking at the analytics and wondering why I was seeing so many more users but not ad revenue. It never occurred to me to break the numbers down by country or other dimensions. It turned out about 20% of my page views were coming from not the US. Of that, most of it was from China, with honorable mention going to Pakistan. Not a lot of roller coasters there, so pretty safe to say that's not legit traffic.
I learned today that Cloudflare actually has a free tier, and I signed up immediately. I put CoasterBuzz and PointBuzz behind it. They do this because having larger samples of site traffic to analyze allows them to better find trends, which benefits their big corporate customers. You don't get all of the functionality, but you do get the important stuff. It'll block bots and AI scrapers for sure. You can also knock out an entire country, if you want. So that's easy enough, block all of China.
What's staggering is that, as I sit here after midnight on an early Tuesday, I've watched it block a thousand requests from there just in the last hour. I have no idea what they're trying to find, but a lot of it looks like the usual exploits, including the PHP stuff that's melting the Internet right now. I don't run that stuff, fortunately.
There's some other cool stuff that I get for free, including CDN functionality, with the caching goodness that comes with that. A CDN (content delivery network) allows people to reach your site by way of points that are closer to them, all over the world. And they cache static files, like images or scripts, so those requests never even reach my site. It's so great.
I'm going to get the first real look at my traffic in many years. Not sure how I didn't realize this was a thing sooner.
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