3 ms·
Around ten years ago I built the analytics system for an Alexa 100 company. The company had a policy of supporting IE6 until its share of traffic was below 1%
by maxk42 6y ago
Around ten years ago I built the analytics system for an Alexa 100 company. The company had a policy of supporting IE6 until its share of traffic was below 1% and it was sitting at around 4% at the time IIRC. This was the figure that was reported industry-wide and this was also what we were seeing internally in our stats. However, partway through the project we decided to switch from an image pixel to javascript tracking. At that point we saw the share of IE6 traffic drop immediately to below 1% and it dawned on me what was happening: A lot of bot creators had been using an IE6 user agent to disguise their activity. This was in the days before headless browsing so the vast majority of them weren't downloading / processing javascript. I thought 4% was high then for bot activity but it wouldn't surprise me if the share has exploded since then.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoOh, I don't doubt that bot activity is rampant. The question is what Cloudflare's false-positive and false-negative rates are; I know from personal experience that they sometimes are convinced that humans are bots, and I assume sometimes bots get by them and therefore get counted as humans. But between those, my personal conclusion is that CF's claims about bot activity should be read with error bars.
- vengefulduck 6y agoAlso keep in mind it was probably a subset of bots using that user agent, so the total bot traffic could have been higher than 4%.
- eli 6y agoYup. Now imagine how many bot frameworks are smart enough to keep up to date with user agent strings. Pro-tip in Google Analytics you can filter by some device color depth = 0 bits and find (what I assume) are all bots that way.