Got a warning for my blog going over 100GB in bandwidth this month… which sounded incredibly unusual. My blog is text and a couple images and I haven’t posted anything to it in ages… like how would that even be possible?
Turns out it’s possible when you have crawlers going apeshit on your server. Am I even reading this right? 12,181 with 181 zeros at the end for ‘Unknown robot’? This is actually bonkers.
Edit: As Thunraz points out below, there’s a footnote that reads “Numbers after + are successful hits on ‘robots.txt’ files” and not scientific notation.
I don’t really get those bots.
Like, there are bots that are trying to scrape product info, or prices, or scan for quantity fields. But why the hell do some of these bots behave the way they do?
Do you use Shopify by chance? With Shopify the bots could be scraping the product.json endpoint unless it’s disabled in your theme. Shopify just seems to show the updated at timestamp from the db in their headers+product data, so inventory quantity changes actually result in a timestamp change that can be used to estimate your sales.
There are companies that do that and sell sales numbers to competitors.
No idea why they have inventory info on their products table, it’s probably a performance optimization.
I haven’t really done much scraping work in a while, not since before these new stupid scrapers started proliferating.
Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.
Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.