[askonomm]

From my analytics, around 85% of visits to my sites are now from bots. It's hard to say if these are oldschool bots or people just browsing the web via chatgpt now, but the reality is that very few actually visit the actual sites I have anymore.

[2ndorderthought]

If you had any data over the past 5 years I would love to read a blog about this. Seeing the numbers would be impactful to me.

[nozzlegear]

The Huawei bot in particular is a scourge.

[est]

I think blogs should have a universal comment function, I'd love to engage ith the author but many blogs don't bother providing a basic textarea.

[ffaser5gxlsll]

The universal contact function is usually there, and it's email. I tried many times: it works. Authors respond. Only very few people seem to want to keep it hidden.

I'm dumbfounded by the number of times I see comments of the form "if the author is reading this ..." on a 3rd party comment side, with a link posted by somebody else, on a forum the author is likely never going to watch, followed by an actually useful comment that you could have _ensured_ the author reads by you know... just contacting him?

Forum comments are just recipe for instant spam, and have been so in the last 10+ years. If you want to make them useful, it currently needs to be actively policed (not to mention: you can be responsible for the content posted as well in several countries now). As an author, only if you're trying to create an audience around your blog, all the hassle around it might be worth it.

[donohoe]

They typically do but are disabled due to the volume of spam and moderation overhead. Send an email.

[coldpie]

I got so much spam on my blog, I turned comments off. There's an email in the footer if readers want to contact me.

[johanyc]

Do you get spam at that email address? I have not published mine because I hate spam

[coldpie]

I mean yeah, but the spam filter takes care of it.

[FabCH]

Send the author an e-mail.

[philipallstar]

I think policing all the spam isn't worth the trouble.