Humans are slow and somewhat unpredictable, at least compared to a bot scraping this web site. I actually like that. After all, my posts are meant to be read by humans and not bots. I welcome bots only if they provide a route for humans to my site, such as search engines. For all other bots, known and unknown intent, you will receive a 403 if I can help it.
Humans usually come in from a search engine. I am well indexed on the Western search engines such as Google, Bing, Apple, DuckDuckGo, but I am also being heavily scraped by the Chinese search engines such as Baidu, YiSou, Sogou, Haosou and others. How much of my content can be found from China I do not know. I have tried searching for my own content on Baidu in Chinese with little success. This Chinese vacuum cleaner sucks hard but does not clean well.
No matter. I do not write content for the benefit of search engines, be they Western or Chinese, but for humans. Humans speak a language, and so says their browser. Humans load the whole web page, which includes javascript, images, and text. Humans need time to read each page, and don’t doggy style swallow it whole and move on to the next page. humans are somewhat civilized in this way, preferring to taste their food. humans need time to both read and understand the contents. They might mill about, get a cookie, go to the bathroom, and then return to read the rest of the content. That is ok by me.
Humans, unsurprisingly, use a single browser. therefore their browser’s ID does not change nor jump around. Humans, even if schizophrenic, do not use browsers that are schizophrenic.
Slow is ok by me. If you are a human and have trouble accessing my content, please let me know. If you are a bot and are blocked, well, you really cannot complain, can you now. And humans need not worry about the honeypots I have on the site. Simply carry on, as if they are not there!
For us humans, I would not worry about the bot world. They are but the periphery of our existence, attempting to manipulate the internet, for possibly better but usually for worse. We could use an anti-bot law. The world would be a better place.
2018 Dec 26 How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
