DARE.CO.UK · DAILY EDITORIAL · 2026-06-03
The week, in a manner of speaking
Tuesday was a day of reconciliation disguised as a request surge. Eleven-and-a-half thousand requests came in—up 17.5% day-on-day and 39.7% above the 7-day average—but page views dropped 21%, the kind of inversion that usually means a lot of robots doing a lot of very specific things. The site absorbed it fine (origin held, cache at 45.6% down from yesterday's 69.7%, which is still respectable). What earned the attention: 804 threats blocked, which is 251% above average and almost certainly related to the recovery work shipping continuously since Tuesday morning. The commit log is a wall of "Body recovery batch"—six through four, then a full cleanup pass—which is to say someone spent the day pulling 140-odd pages back from a 4TB WordPress archive and repairing image references faster than the bots could probe for ghosts. The 404s are telling the real story: `/cdn-cgi/content`, `/cdn-cgi/rum`, the Cloudflare static loader, plus a cropped Ziiiro image someone clearly relied on—all patterns of links the old site used to serve but doesn't anymore. The homepage, about, and contact held steady doing the work they always do. The real traffic is probably not here—the homepage at 301 hits against 11,550 requests suggests most of the surge came from indexing, scraping, or bots testing whether the old URL scheme still works. It doesn't, and that's the point.