This blog is getting a HUGE number of obviously mechanical “views” today. Most of them are “seeing” the previous item on Campbells Soup, which is not politically or culturally interesting in any way. Normally such items are carefully AVOIDED by all real viewers.
All are coming through Oracle Cloud, all are clearly timed at regular intervals, and all show the same OS and device type. For some reason the WordPress data tracker isn’t filtering these out, and it’s also treating each of these repetitive views as a new “visitor”, which it clearly isn’t.
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12 hours later: The viewbot is still ticking along. WP’s graph switched scale when the fake “views” exceeded 100. Now the real views for the whole month are distorted by the one day of fake “views”. This is why data needs to be checked and selected! Basic rule of metrology.
3 days later: The reader finally stopped. Mass scanners on the old Blogspot blog were trying to sample the entire 15 years of the blog. They scattered their reads randomly over the whole span, which is a rational way of gathering info. This Oracle reader confined itself to recent weeks, reading each item many times. I don’t know the purpose of either kind, but the Oracle makes even less sense. Reading the same item 10 times doesn’t gain any new information at all, it just wastes bandwidth. The only thing it really accomplished was blurring MY view of real readers by flooding the zone with nonsense. Is that the real purpose?
Polistra's Mill 