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A simple way to try and block out bots is to just not allow your ads to show to Linux users. It's a tiny fraction of most website's traffic but the largest shar
by ssharp 10y ago
A simple way to try and block out bots is to just not allow your ads to show to Linux users. It's a tiny fraction of most website's traffic but the largest share of bot traffic. I'd further speculate that real desktop Linux users are substantially more likely to have an ad block running anyway.
- ams6110 10y agoAnd why would a bot disclose that it's a "linux user" and not just send some sort of Windows agent string?
- fictioncircle 10y agoA non-negligible portion of the bot networks are teenagers and college students learning how to manipulate the system. Inexperienced operators like that make amateur mistakes like leaving in default user-agent strings for a variety of tools that are frequently linux-based as its cheap to go on something like LowEndTalk.com, pick up a couple $2/month VMs, pick up some proxies, and test out a small group of bots designed to fake traffic to generate Ad revenue. The reason I said teenagers & students is you have to be really, really sophisticated for that sort of operation to scale beyond $100/month in profit so its generally something I've seen people "learn" on, realize the limitations, and move on. (i.e. Making no amateur mistakes that flag your traffic as non-legit and being able to use an IP address only a couple of times a day in random patterns)
- angry-hacker 10y agoI'm interested in that theory too. If anything, bot would like to make an expression of being a wealthy macbook owner using safari.
- cannonpr 10y agoEh, bots these days use a good distribution of user agents strings and you can define the type when buying traffic typically. There are ways of finger printing browser engines but that's not done for ad bidding. Plus even if it comes into play bots will just shift to virtualised windows stacks.