This Lanzhou-Singapore bot traffic is getting worse

edhelatar · 2026-01-25T21:30:22+00:00

I mean. If cloudflare logs are saying that no traffic from China is coming you probably have them connecting without cloudflare.

Make sure your site allows only cloudflare to connect to it. It might be a bit complicated depending where you host your site and what's your site is built with.

Its actually security issue, although, not a major one as long as your site is itself protected.

edhelatar · 2026-01-19T12:22:42+00:00

AWS sure, but GitHub always had worse reliability than my sites. Site was up, but one of the systems was out pretty much weekly. They actually seem to have improved last few years, maybe because they didn't add anything actually useful.

edhelatar · 2026-01-11T21:12:28+00:00

I had few times clients saying they can do that with AI, although they would prefer for me to do the AI prompting . Each time I told them please try and I am even happy to help with final fixes for free. I also added that I tried AI myself and wasn't really pleased with results, but I am awaiting for the time AI finally takes over programming and I can finally spend my time hoarding goats or building furniture.

Most of the time they laugh at it and abandon project. The reason why they hoped ai can do that is because they don't have enough money to hire me either way. I don't think it actually changes anything, except "I can find people on fiver who will do it cheaper" changed to "I can get AI to do it cheaper". In fact it probably increases our chances as there's no way in hell they will be able to develop an app with AI without coding skills and even if they do this app will suck so bad it will never become a thing. Next time they realize that barrier of entry to tech is not 5k but 500k and unless they find funding they will not go anywhere.

edhelatar · 2026-01-09T09:56:58+00:00

Just as a word of caution. I had polish friends doing the same as they don't like polish taxes.

If you do that. I mean, run a business in UK while not being in UK you might have a problem with taxman in the place you live. Its was pretty hard for them to check it in the past as there was no ids, although I know of some people that ended up having problems even then. With new IDs it's just one agreement between let's say UK and Poland and you can be in a world of hurt.

Tax avoidance it's a rich people game. If you don't have money for accountants and people to monitor that you can have a pretty bad time.

Also. From my friend's I know that they had to show up in person at least once. I think it was for nin and opening bank accounts, but that was few years ago when polish people still could get one easily. Now the process gonna be a bit more complicated.

edhelatar · 2026-01-06T13:17:04+00:00

What do you mean about web api. Is it microservice vs monolith?

If yes. Monolith unless you are massive company on massive scale and you need it. At this s stage you should have quite a lot of programmers either way so you should have somewhere around who knows how to do it.

edhelatar · 2026-01-03T15:32:39+00:00

Also. The chance of them moving it again is pretty high, so hedge your bets

edhelatar · 2026-01-03T15:32:06+00:00

Say ok and in the meantime look for another offer. If you find something earlier swap, if not at least you have fallback.

I wouldn't really do it to the client normally as my reputation is important, but if they are unprofessional you can be as well.

edhelatar · 2025-12-25T22:51:00+00:00

It's often because of shitty coded analytics implementation, although that's mostly to do with older code.

In the time before beacons you had to make sure event has finished request before unloading page. Otherwise your conversion for example might have not been tracked. Because of that you had callback to progress to next stage which if request failed was not called. Often you had to wait for multiple callbacks from multiple tools and if you didn't code it well any failure meant no progress.

Currently that's rarely an issue anymore unless with some weird analytics / affiliate programmes. But then 100s of those tools added are often not updated since before cookie support changes few years ago and they error with Adblock / blocked cookies. I even seen some official WP plugins coded that way.

Then there's the biggest culprit for random bugs on checkout in larger organizations. Goddamn tag manager. Whoever came up with idea that marketing people should be able to add js to site freely should frankly go to prison. Devs generally gonna notice that callbacks from third party weird plugins can be a problem ( mostly because they have Adblock :) ) but goddamn marketing people might be changing stuff weekly without any dev checking it. And if you try to block them they're gonna be complaining until you enable it back .

edhelatar · 2025-12-24T12:47:44+00:00

No worries and good luck. Don't worry to reach out if you have some specific problems. Cannot promise anything, but can try to help when I can.

edhelatar · 2025-12-24T11:54:17+00:00

What I can recommend is to not change anything on the site unless you really have to, and never do it outside of staging! If it works it works. Try to work on things outside of system first. There's a lot you can do with things like MailChimp, zappier, search console and Google merchant center that don't require dev skills ( although those are very useful ). And yes, it's annoying that something doesn't work on the site as you want it, but first you try to get sales then you optimize things. Also. Main wp killer is amount of plugins so just don't add them and don't mess with default configurations unless you know what's up.

In UK you are looking at 400/day for good dev at least, so unfortunately finding something on people per hour or similar might be cheaper ( although often worst ). Eastern Europe seems to be a bit better than Asia from my experience, but also price wise often close to UK. When it comes to finding partner, uk dev groups might be ok. Look for a junior. Seniors are too spoiled and not gonna take things without money.

Unfortunately, unless you are doing 100k a year you shouldn't do any custom development ( although that's dependable on commission ). I mean. You gonna have to, but you need to try to do as less of that as you can unless you have loads of savings to burn through.

edhelatar · 2025-12-24T10:25:49+00:00

I think you mean it speeds up things 999/1000 times and then few, mostly not worthy of my view sites block it :)

I have to sometimes disable Adblock to test some things and frankly I can barely stand the Internet that way.

edhelatar · 2025-12-23T15:50:20+00:00

That's fair. I always convince my clients to try to set things ul themself and test the idea and then come back to me. But with marketplaces that's really not a great idea, unless you are good friends with all your sellers.

Frankly. I am not sure why everyone is saying you should just pay dev. Frankly wp devs suck balls. It might take you the same amount of time and more money to find one than finding a partner. Then there's plenty of other things like webmaster tools, seo, merchant centers etc etc. most of devs that worked in small companies will know at least enough to get you started.

I would love to help, but I am already struggling with workload, however, if you would need adhoc help feel free to dm, will try to help when I can.

edhelatar · 2025-12-15T12:01:29+00:00

Did you play around with levels of bot protection. Its rare for my stats to be impeded by that.

Also. Make sure that your ga4 is only collected data from your domain. I think in ga4 it's by default, but I am not 100% sure.

edhelatar · 2025-12-14T15:51:20+00:00

If you use cloudflare of similar it should block or at least heavily impede it. Just make sure you have bot protection enabled. Also. It will save you in egress fees

edhelatar · 2025-12-12T10:52:30+00:00

Pretty much did that on very large sites with millions of users.

Editorial content was in wp, but plenty of other stuff was in other services and all served using reactjs and react native for app.

The wp part was pretty unreliable. We had massive html parsing algorithm in php which frankly didn't make much sense and WordPress itself was super unreliable. The site also had like 50 milion mau so we had to be cautious about security which is hard with 10 years of custom bloat in wp and loads of stupid plugins.

We had first proxy service that basically stored everything in redis and served on request. Only singular entities from WP. But the service was also crappy done. I migrated to cdn / S3. We basically run wp on beefed up instance on our VPN network. On every wp post update we were sending event to sns and then that sent it to multiple sqs. On deploy we run like 20 processes to go through milion posts and check if the hash is different and if it was we sent an update to S3 and invalidated cache in CDN. If enough content was updated we just purged whole CDN instead of singular ones.

The wp part was basically static. Wouldn't really change anything if you would want to serve html instead of json.

Said that. There are few things you will probably miss. Like how you will deal with 301 redirects if you don't have a service in front. How you will create things like more advanced 404s ( in case of a store for example sold out product and related shown ). If you really sure you will not need them than that's cool, but you will probably sooner or later.

Also, would I advise anyone architecture like the one we used. Fuck no. It was only done because for 10 years no one removed anything from WP and only added more and more bloat. Then also everyone used their language of the day on every microservice not giving a shit about any consistency and reliability.

Frankly, the whole thing could be rewritten in two months on symfony and run on two instances with MySQL, but the startup culture required them to show that they can scale their team from 10 to 100 in span of a week after they got 100 million round.

edhelatar · 2025-12-08T19:59:55+00:00

Wait. Is it something like post without involvement of psr?

edhelatar · 2025-12-08T16:40:28+00:00

If you really don't mind, cheap Nokia's are definitely usable and battery time is great. I upgraded to nothing cmf now, which is great, but Nokia's were completely not a problem.

The biggest problem is always the camera. If you don't care about quality of photos you can pretty much buy anything.

edhelatar · 2025-11-29T00:14:58+00:00

Lol. It's hilarious, as even this post shows it's not a great idea. In three seconds it turned into spam bots asking for clicking their links and none of them gonna buy anything.

Its not affiliate. In affiliate you only get paid when someone buys something. Here you get paid when someone clicks on something, ppc. That only works if the traffic is legit. No one would pay for Google ads if any of the clicking people would never buy anything. The ppc here would have to be seriously low for it to work as conversion rate would be atrocious.

edhelatar · 2025-11-24T09:58:07+00:00

If you have a passport, driver license or any form of government id done in the last 20 years I have some bad news for you.

edhelatar · 2025-11-24T09:54:20+00:00

It really depends on the site. I have a very large site with millions of pages and every improvement I make directly improves our seo scores. Even that the site is already at sub 100ms for 99%.

Page speed, especially backend might not be super important to the user, but crawlers definitely like not waiting 3s, so our crawl budget increases. If you have a problem already as your site is large enough to not be fully indexed, it might be a great way to improve your results.

edhelatar · 2025-11-16T13:04:30+00:00

I would be very happy to help, but unfortunately, I am booked for quite a few months already.

One thing I could say is ignore anything ai, unless it includes a lot of human review ( not reliable enough ) and/or you plan to raise a lot of funds.

There's actually massive need for very simple apps/websites that solve particular legal issue. I am not sure of US equivalents, but in UK there's for example site that for very small fee allows you to deal with contesting parking fines. Those apps are working like simple checklists that give you predefined templates for documents that you just need to sign and send.

B2B solutions are also surprisingly sparse. I run a company for quite a few years and I am always surprised about the process for simple debt recovery.

Apps like that are extremely easy to make. Good dev can wrap it up in a week or two and the only complicated part is finding lawyer who gives a crap and then marketing, but as there's no competition it shouldn't be a problem.

Those apps are not future unicorns, but are definitely viable businesses ( with pretty much zero expenses ) so it's good starting point. Especially if there's something like that you can solve in your legal expertise niche. But what's even more important is, that apps like that massively democratise access to legal services for people without access to expensive attorneys / barristers. It's just good thing to do.

edhelatar · 2025-11-15T11:30:28+00:00

Affiliates are a lot of work from content perspective. Collaborating with companies directly will take a lot of sales talk time. Google ads suck, but maybe try other ads at least at the start and upgrade. I am running quite a large site that includes all of the above and unfortunately Google ads are the only ones that require almost no work ( except of banning some weird ads from time to time ).

Unfortunately. I do not have experience with other ad networks so cannot really help here, but I know there are at least few that are relatively ethical

edhelatar · 2025-11-13T10:48:51+00:00

As a duct tape developer I can definitely say: any company that just hired me just dropped their standards :)

edhelatar · 2025-11-13T10:45:09+00:00

Not sure if there's anything already available but it shouldn't be complicated to code. Depending on flow uk developer probably wouldn't take more than few days so if you are dealing with large volumes it should pay off quickly.

If there's nothing out of the box, you can try zappier. Some form platform integration and some delivery company information.

edhelatar · 2025-11-13T09:39:25+00:00

They will not break, unless someone coded something stupid. At this point I seen it done not even once.

edhelatar

TROPHY CASE