Bots!

Ever since I posted about Jeff's boyhood home being for sale, there isn't a week that goes by when a real estate bot doesn't post a comment after that story. Here's the latest one.

What a hilariously ineffective bot! Let's advertise our realty service, on a post about a home where someone was brutally murdered and butchered! 

A recent study revealed that  nearly TWO THIRDs of website hits and page views come from bots. Just think about that for a sec. Now a good chunk of that is search engines. But, according to the study, 31 per cent of bots are still classed as ‘malicious’. Scraper bots (these comb the web for exploitable information, anything from emails to news content) make up 5 per cent of web traffic whilst general purpose hacking tools (the sort of bots that might be employed by a criminal to steal your credit card data) make up 4.5 per cent.

So this site, as offbeat and non-commercial as they come,  is being regularly visited by scraper bots. They hit on "home" and "for sale" and blammo. Comment left. I've probably deleted 30 comments. 

They ineffectiveness of these bots is quite a comfort, actually.