DARE.CO.UK · DAILY EDITORIAL · 2026-06-02
The week, in a manner of speaking
Tuesday was the day someone decided Cloudflare's static assets were dare's problem to solve. Requests spiked 17.5% to 11,550—mostly noise from CDN infrastructure looking for `/cdn-cgi/` paths that don't exist here (37 404s for `/cdn-cgi/content` alone, plus another 49 across the Cloudflare-static variants). The threats-blocked counter agrees: 804 in a single day, versus a 7-day average of 228. So either dare got noticed by a new botnet, or the same old one got bored and angry. The actual site traffic told a different story. Page views dropped 21.1% to 3,054 despite the request surge—cache hit rate crumbled from 69.7% to 45.6%, the kind of collapse that happens when you're serving a lot of junk alongside the real thing. Homepage, About, and Contact held their positions. The archive work shipped over the past week—image recoveries, relative path rewrites, caption fixes across cinema and observations—wasn't reflected in any obvious traffic shift. That's fine. Archive fixes are for humans three years from now, not Tuesday's metrics. The 404 volume suggests dare's origin is still doing its job; the blocklist is just doing its job louder.