Numbers Odd
I figured I'd throw stats on this site like the old days, but stats like they used to be: Information about how the server was reacting to user demand, not information about users.
I really don't want to know anything about you, the reader, unless you tell me yourself, preferably over email. It's privilege enough to have you show up. Nor do I want to even think about GDPR or other punishments Europe has meted out to the web platform for its overreach. No cookies.
Not that I'm particularly virtuous. We use analytics, and retargeting, and all manner of normal marketing awkwardness at the office. But this is home.
The chat suggested goaccess. I installed it and it works fine. But the numbers don't make sense. This is not false modesty. It makes no sense.
There is no way that 82,522 unique visitors came last week. Or that 40 gigs were transacted. Given the way audience works now and how many people see RSS, a few hundred could be the outside. My bet would be under a hundred. So it must be bots, or RSS feeds, or bots reading RSS feeds.
Digging in lightly you start to see some shape of it—tons of attempts by bot farms to log into WordPress admins that don’t exist, other strange URLs. Maybe the stats themselves are misconfigured. It’s been so long that I looked at unfiltered logs.
There’s obviously a ghost web—AI bots in a frenzy, infinite compromised machines looking to compromise other machines, the individual server as a natural resource to be mined, or even better, stolen, turned into a link farm, made to send spam messages. Sure, 25 years ago the same kind of long soft attack was going on, it was just once an hour instead of everywhere constantly.
When you’re building sites you develop empathy for the machines in their racks and I suddenly had a flash of some little slotted box, hosting 10 or 100 virtual machines, under siege by a million buzzy-bee attacker drones. Hang in there little box! Over time I will come to understand this traffic because it interests me how we turned a single simple protocol, HTTP, into a global geopolitical and criminal war zone, and how we turned people publishing their little thoughts into cheap digital coal to be extracted and jammed into vectors.
One day, little server, I will abandon you too.
I don't have a grand conclusion. I'm just noting the change, and that I'll figure it out some day. In the meantime memories of optimizations past come unbidden to mind. I will need to gzip everything; I will need my content types set correctly; I will need to cache with proper ETAGs. So many hours lost to Apache's regexp syntax, and it's not like I can explain the pain to anyone except a vanishing few grayheaded souls like myself. Nor was it particularly meaningful work. I'm just noting that my soul was forged in Apache config files, setting up virtual hosts, and seeking to do redirects as the new CMS came online, and that these experiences did mean something to me, logged into some server somewhere.
Now you just say “do this.” Claude codes, Claude deploys, Claude breaks everything at midnight, all of which used to be my job.
The stats make no sense.