Casualties of the bot war

The ongoing war against the bots has been marginally successful, with bandwidth theft significantly down and many so-called "AI" pirate bots sent down a nonsense rabbit hole. Cloudfare has been a good thing and it hasn't cost much beyond my time. (It's also created a new way to waste said time, as I study the logs of what bots get sent down the labyrinth and what get stopped in their tracks and what suspected bots still get through the barriers.)

But there has been one purely negative side effect: I've also lost almost all of my legitimate traffic. Not, as one might first suspect, due to real people being treated as bots. Rather, because readers were coming here when prompted by email and now they're not.

I really didn't understand how reliant this site was on the email notifications. It turns out that nearly all of my traffic came from people getting those emails and clicking through. There are a couple of exceptions, including at least one that relies on an RSS reader (which is what I and Cory Doctorow recommend for everyone!), but the vast majority of you all are out-of-sight-out-of-mind types that need an email prompt. And the Cloudfare stuff made my previous email update infrastructure go all wonky, so I had to try something new.

Theoretically, the new system should work nearly as well. The same people get an email every day there's a new post. The differences are:

• The new system is much more likely to get intercepted by spam filters for reasons explained earlier;
• The new system goes out at the same time every day there's a new post to alert to, which had been in the morning but I've now changed, rather than right after I publish a post no matter what time it was;
• The new system sends HTML email where the old one sent plain text.

The last point is probably immaterial; the number of email clients that can't handle HTML is tiny these days, plus there's a fallback that goes out to them that links to the HTML version. The other two seem to be really serious, though, because only a sparse few of these newer emails have generated any visits.

Point two I've made an adjustment to, thinking that perhaps by sending the email in the morning people are getting it amidst a bunch of other emails and it gets buried or forgotten. So I've changed it to send at 3:00pm PST to see if timing makes any difference. Point one is a bigger problem, as it's up to the recipient to tell whatever spam filter is being used to allow email from *@starshiptim.com unhindered, I can't do anything about that from here. And I know some of my audience won't even know how to do that.

It used to be that most of my traffic depended on goddamn Facebook, but now incoming traffic from that digital scourge is almost nothing too thanks to the ever-changing algorithms over there that punish my links because I never use FB for anything else. So people that allegedly "follow" me there don't see my links nearly as often as they would under prior versions of their feed algorithm. And I'm not about to play Zuckerberg's game and placate that misinformation factory.

So, tweaks continue. I'd thank you for your continued patience, but it seems very few of you will actually read this, so I'd just be yelling into the void.