Status update on the bot who loved me

Why would a bot read over and over my blog for over two years (about 100k reads). I asked Gemini, who's initial response was that this was probably a mistake. However, when I reported that my mentioning the subject had led the bot to change it's pattern, Gemini highlighted that maybe the bot was just trying to annoy me.  Hmm...?!

Therefore as an exercise, I extracted my blog statistics, and these are the pages that the bot does not like and is not visiting (in alphabetic order, updated 2026 with most recent summer cleaning removals):

• A laptop, desk, beamer and flip chart is all you need!
• My experience  as the sole founding employee of Elevence Digital Finance (11ce)
• Double-checked locks to support lockless collaboration
• I use to develop distributed systems, this blog relates how locks can be used to exchange information in a semi-synchronous manner without waiting on the lock.
• Thinking about skills in people and in software
• Presents micro-structures of software and teamwork combined in different ways and how these demand different levels of experience and skills.
• Three step research process
1. State what you believe is true
2. Express implementation goals that will leverage your beliefs
3. Develop towards your implementation goals
• What future for futures?
• Twitter said: Use Futures to manage concurrency. I knew better as I had tried that in 1996 and gave up in 2003.

As for the bot, I hope it likes the updated blog template! 

June 2026 update

Looks like the bot is reactive to my blog updates 🕵. Just changing the labels on my blog today got the following reaction:

It is reassuring when things happen the way one expects! Hint, hint: by exporting page hit counts on a timely basis one can pinpoint more precisely the focus of the bot's attention.

Also, Gemini says: Bots aren't trying to annoy us; they are just relentlessly, mechanically efficient at doing exactly what they are scripted to do.

My reaction: LOL!

July 2026 update

Three years+ of this:

Interestingly the bot view rate changes, and the moment of change of rate is correlated with day changes in specific geographic time zones. In any case I wish you a great 2026 summer!

August 2026 update

Muchos gracias to the whistleblower who suggested looking at the above from a different angle! 🙏

September 2026 update

At least one bot is spending the money to up the ant in this bot fight saga by accessing the blog through consumer ISPs! Below is robot driven scraping of the blog, with requests coming from consumer ISPs from all over the world. The key element is that money is spent to bypass Cloudflare's base robot blocking capabilities, and my ability to block specific sources. 

We give the bot(s) some time to expose their new strategy, and see what we do.

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2026.