DARE.CO.UK · DAILY EDITORIAL · 2026-06-08
The week, in a manner of speaking
Monday saw requests spike 41% to 9,720 (a ghost of the 7-day average, which dare's learned to accept), while page views flatlined at 2,749 — the homepage still doing the heavy lifting with 410 hits, the rest of the archive scattered in the usual 13-to-17 range. The interesting part: cache hit rate collapsed from 57.2% to 41.7%, which tracks with the bulk of that request surge being either bots (348 threats blocked, up 8% on average) or image-hunt traffic from the recent image-recovery work. Those three weeks of body-recovery batches and WP-era URL migrations have left a visible scar — 20,089 total 404s across 90 days, with 23 hits each on `/cdn-cgi/rum`, CloudFlare's Rocket Loader script, and a cropped ziiiro image that's been thoroughly dead. Meanwhile /tilting-at-windmills/ is holding its perennial six readers like a man holding an umbrella in a hurricane — dignified, consistent, utterly indifferent to the weather. France and Canada are keeping the international traffic honest at 7k and 5.5k respectively, but 85% of the noise is still US-based, which means the botnets are at least patriotic.