I run a number of websites, some of which could even be said to be popular. I want humans to visit these websites, enjoy these websites, make their change of trains at New Street in good time, investigate miscarriages of justice, or find out the play they watched in London when hitch-hiking round Europe in the ’80s.

But I find it harder to do this when my server is swamped with artificial traffic from bots, AI clankers, and whatever else nonsense there is nowadays (Weird Gloop has a good summary; I don’t have wikis but for other reasons am basically in the same boat). This is especially egregious when they are incredibly poorly written and constantly fetch basically identical pages which may cause issues not just on my own server but with upstream sources. Clearly the people behind all this simply do not think or care (and as an aside, this is why I cannot extricate positives from this technology without the negatives alongside, and how it has been/is being introduced).

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