Bots are Reading the Blog

...but it appears they can only read the first page. I have temporarily changed a setting so only one post is displayed on each page. Melvin and I apologize for any inconvenience to human readers. (Yes, both of you.)

Update: January 24, 2017
That didn't work so I have reset the posts-per-page setting again.

Addenda

February 7, 2017
All time high yesterday, 529 page views. Of course, almost none of these were human readers so it doesn't mean anything.

February 11, 2017
It appears that the bots are starting to get bored with Baseball Byways. However, more than 10 percent of all page "views" ever have occurred since the bots arrived not quite four weeks ago.

I used to fret over page views, at first because there were so few. (We averaged around 18-20 per day for years.) Later, I became dismayed because so many readers were looking for something else, most noticeably small carnivorous weasels or half-naked tattooed ladies. The automated page views contribute to the pointlessness of our tracking page views.

February 15, 2017
Over 8,000 page views for the previous 30 days! Standard caveat applies.

February 27, 2017
I mentioned to a friend, who manages several websites for a not-for-profit, that bots are reading the blog. He said that his sites have been pinged more frequently than usual and one little used website was hacked. "It's the Russians!," I quipped.

My buddy said it is probably no joke and then pointed out something that I hadn't noticed. The one-day spike shown at the top of this post came on the day that Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States of America.

Jonathan Winters in The Russians are Coming! The Russians are Coming! (1966)

May 31, 2017
It appears that Baseball Byways is no longer of interest to non-human "readers."

September 22, 2017
Although traffic volume is way down—from an all-time monthly high of 6,246 pageviews in February to 1,210 last month—Baseball Byways continues to be popular in Russia, almost as popular as here in the states. Also in the United Arab Emirates. What's up with that?

one week, mid-September 2017

December 26, 2017
Although pageviews are way down, the uniformity of the periodicity and number of views lead me to conclude that much of our traffic, insignificant as it may be, is still automated.

February 28, 2018
Two months later, we're still getting pinged four times a day, pretty much at the same exact time every day. As Tony Orlando might sing, "Ping four times on the ceiling if you want me."

September 2, 2018
A new pattern has emerged, or at least the appearance of one: every two weeks, we get a large number of pageviews, all at once. We got 226 pageviews between 5:00 and 7:00 am (CDT) yesterday. And the majority of pageviews are from "Unknown Region;" greater than the United States, the United Arab Emirates and Russia combined, the next three locations.

October 28, 2018
The new pattern continues:
September 28 — 174 pageviews
October 12 — 203
October 27 — 183

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