Over the course of this blog’s sixteen years of life, it typically has received in the range of 5,000 – 10,000 page visits per month. A handful of times a particular post has generated a lot more visits in a single month (the highest until recently was almost 45,000 visits in August 2023). But the tendency towards the 5-10K range has been surprisingly consistent.
To a great extent, ongoing page visits have been driven by my Swords and Sorcery house rules (which were written for Swords & Wizardry, but can be used with most versions of TSR/OSR D&D). Also popular have been some of my writings on the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. I’m gratified that people continue to find these posts interesting. (My own gaming interests have drifted in a different direction in recent years. But I still like both games very much and expect that I’ll play them again sometime in the future.)
Every so often I’ll check the stats for this blog. When I did so recently, I was surprised to see that total visits to this blog had exceeded two million (at the time of this writing, 2088800), and that was in part driven by a huge surge last August. In that month alone, the blog received 183055 visits – more than four times the number of visits of my previous most popular month. And most of those visits were to my only post that month, which simply noted that playtest materials for the Against the Starmaster (VsSM) game were now available.
Given that I’m a huge fan of Against the Darkmaster (VsD), I certainly hope that its forthcoming science-fiction counterpart is a great success. But VsD is a pretty obscure game, and VsSM is still in its playtesting stage. So I’m baffled as to why this rather minor post attracted so much traffic. There was an Activision game (for the Atari 2600) called “Starmaster” back in the early 1980s. But surely that can’t explain what happened last August.
Hmm…
It's just bots. All three of my semi-active blogs have seen similar massive spikes in the last two years, some several times, and I know I'm not the only one. You see a month or six weeks of hits several orders of magnitude greater than normal, in my case randomly poking at posts new and old with no rhyme or reason. What they were doing I'm not sure - there was no corresponding jump in attempts at spam comments, site hijacking or denial of service - but it's probably related to AI scraping info from any source it stumbles across.
ReplyDeleteThat makes sense. I thought it was probably something AI-related initially. But when the normal pattern resumed after August, I doubted that assumption. For some reason, I thought that AI scraping would be continuous (i.e., there would be an across-the-board and ongoing surge of bot visits). But I have no idea how any of this works, and the "bots" explanation is almost certainly correct.
DeleteI hate this timeline.
Love your blog - I likewise experienced a strange 45k surge of traffic in early July from a url in Viet Nam over the course of a single day.
ReplyDelete