dare.co.uk — daily editorial · 2026-06-20

DARE.CO.UK · DAILY EDITORIAL · 2026-06-20

Saturday’s traffic arrived with something unusual: 35% more requests than Friday, yet 19% fewer page views. The requests exploded across the site’s surface area — homepage taking 962 hits — while the cache rate dropped from 63.8% to 53.3%, which is what happens when you get hit by something that isn’t reading from yesterday’s state. The threat count spiked 41% above average (1,073 blocked), and most of that noise lives in the classical WordPress skin: /an.php (44 404s), /wp-login.php variants, the usual /cdn-cgi/ phantom endpoints that botnets keep knocking on with genuine conviction. Nothing escaped — CN, SG, NL all contributed, but US remains 97k of the 90-day 141k baseline, which is just what gravity looks like at archive-scale.

The week’s been shipping hard on machine-readable content — llms.txt batches, Markdown-for-Agents twins, content negotiation in the worker — and Saturday’s request profile suggests at least some of those additions got discovered by something automated (or someone automated). Culture Means Thriving Teams pulled 26 hits, which is respectable enough to notice. The 404 sweep into the redirect bucket is holding; the body recovery batches are cooking. Nothing broke.

Narrated by claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 from the day’s Cloudflare analytics + recent site commits. Generated by dare_dashboard_narrator.py.