Some great advice from Cybarbie on Mastodon about Cloudflare and my putting Autocade behind it:
Sure enough, after following her advice, I saw the numbers improve after a 9,000-page-view day, to two consecutive days of 11,000. Visitor numbers have increased from c. 5,500 to 6,490 in a 24-hour period:
This feels more comfortable. Some IP addresses are getting caught, but those are the dodgy ones. I notice I had similar settings on other sites we placed behind Cloudflare, but had forgotten that I must have changed the defaults. I’ve not noticed any issues myself, even though, from time to time, I encounter a Cloudflare block on others’ sites.
And what a great reminder of how good Mastodon is, with the expertise on there.
Unlike another site, I’m more confident our numbers are mostly human (we let search engines spider for their indices, though not for “AI”). On MySpaceX or OnlyKlans, or whatever Twttr is called these days, our audience is not 75·85 per cent bot. That’s well higher than Facebook.
PS.: The top countries still astonish me, after a week. In pole position is China, with 139,708 requests; Singapore, 99,477; US, 81,324; France, 26,236; and Germany, 12,582. Most days, China and Singapore lead, sometimes the US has a good day and rises up. Fourth and fifth vary day to day: at the time of writing, Russia has been in fifth for the last 24 hours.
P.PS.: What a relief: after two weeks, I’ve seen days with 15,000–21,000 page views since Autocade was put behind Cloudflare. I’d love to see a 40,000 or a 60,000 day again soon!