Will this mean sad days ahead?

Following on from the recent post I made about the phenomenal and unprecedented leap in views of this blog, I have installed a plugin to help stop AI scraping. The fact that such a plugin exists is enough to convince me that it is important to use one. I am also wondering whether I will have to stop blogging and delete the entire contents of my blog. Hopefully, it will not yet come to that.

Here are some statistics for the Month to Date taken this morning, 9 November 2025:

Most, if not all, of these have come from a direct link to the blog rather than via a search engine. I can only assume this is due to a processor creating random alphanumeric sequences until it hits a successful url. Another interesting statistic is that almost all come from a desktop Mac computer using a Chrome browser.

The test will be if the AI scraping plugin stops it happening, which can possibly be adjudged by a reduction of views. I shall report more on this tomorrow. After installing and activating the plugin, these were the views from the top cities:

Since installing the plugin, there is a statement at the top of each post to the effect that they have been protected. Of course, this won’t change the ‘views’ but it does protect the information.

Mirinda and I had a long discussion about the implications of AI scraping. Given this blog is generally a personal, diary type of record means that personal information could be gathered very quickly and changed into a massive record of our lives. This could then be used for nefarious means.

We are still debating our options but, if worse comes to worst, then my options would be to password protect every post and only make them accessible to my nine subscribers or, ultimately, to delete the whole thing. This would also mean deleting it from the Wayback Machine.

This is not what the Internet should be. This is not what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he created it. This is not free circulation of information.

This is control.