An Open Letter to the Bots from China Flooding My Site

Greetings Bots from China,

Welcome to my blog. I know you have been poking around her for the past month and a half, but we haven’t formerly been introduced to each other. So, hello! I’m Matthew Groff.

And you are? (Please feel free to leave your answers in a comment.) (In fact, anyone who is reading this should feel free to leave a comment.) (And feel free to subscribe as well.)

Like I said, I have noticed that you bots have looking at all of my posts, and also have been doing searches on different topics. I hope you are finding my posts interesting, and if something does tickle your interest, please give it a “like.” It helps drive traffic, I get a little more money, which will allow me to post more. You, you get how it works.

I know that there is a chance that you bots are scrubbing my site, stealing my words, ideas and thoughts. If true, it’s not the nicest thing to do, especially if you reuse my intellectual property and try to pass it off as your own. Not cool, and I would hope that you stop.

But there is a chance that you bots are AI training, and I would like to suggest that this might not be a good idea for you. First of all, I am flattered that you would think that my site would be positive place for your AI to get a better understanding of the world, and how humans think. But if you do go back to when I started the blog in 2017, you’re going to find a bunch of type-o’s and some really bad sentences. (Type-o’s are still a problem if I’m honest, so beware…) I say all of this because you might be teaching your AI to be rather quippy, to use too many non-sequiturs, and share lots of references to shit no one cares about. The again, if you want your AI to sound like an early middle-aged Gen-X white male who grunged too much in his teens and twenties, then you might be in the right place.

Anyway, I hope you bots found what you’re looking for, and move on your way. I don’t know if you know this, but there are a ton of people out there that blog about home improvement stuff, which I’m sure will be fertile ground for you.

Wish you the best but please go away,

Matthew


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2 responses to “An Open Letter to the Bots from China Flooding My Site”

  1. disassociated Avatar

    Most of the AI scrapers I’ve seen in the past swoop in, index (or whatever) a few thousand pages, and leave as suddenly as they arrived. One the Chinese bots has been going through my website for maybe a month a half now, and just when you think they’ve finished (i.e. through very little activity appearing on web stats), they return again the next day.

    The current bot typically looks at 50 to 100 pages daily. Maybe they think they’ll go unnoticed by operating in “stealth”? I’m looking at an .htaccess file option to try and block them out. Hopefully they’ve moved away from your website by now 🙂

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    1. Matthew Groff Avatar
      Matthew Groff

      For the most part, they have moved on, as it seems I was their target in September. Though about once a week now, I will get a day when I’m inundated with searches on my site, so I know they’re still scrapping. I’m still thinking about options, haven’t made a decision on what to do yet.

      But hey, thanks for checking out the blog, really appreciate it.

      Like

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