In our new "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
Does anyone have insight into what drives traffic to philpaper/people, or how awareness of pages spreads? I guess it's hard to track the exact flow of awareness?
I usually get c.1000 hits a month on my papers, but the for the last 5 days I've been getting 500 hits a day, and 90% of them are from different localities in Vietnam and Brazil. I guess you really have no idea who your audience is…
I noticed this too, and it happened to the Cocoon's visit numbers a year or two ago. Several readers speculated that it's probably PhilPapers being scraped to train AI. This seems like the most likely scenario to me as well.
Obviously, it's a bit late now, but seems to me that webhosts should probably implement things to prevent this (such as CAPTCHA tests). ¯\\(ツ)/¯
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