On Stats

 As many of you regular blog readers may know, I had started running a "Weekly Top Five" list on weekends to point folks to posts which were getting read more than others. I thought it would be a fun way to see how people used the blog. 

When you have 20 years of archives,  the stats used to show me some interesting things. There were times when certain posts would bubble up to the surface because maybe a forum somewhere linked to it. Maybe a website linked to a certain subject here. You just never really knew what might turn up. 

That is, until this Summer. 

At some point this Summer, it is my opinion that artificial intelligence, web crawling bots, or aliens were pumping up the numbers artificially. Maybe it is all three things. I don't know. 

I do know every week it gets more and more ridiculous to the point I do not believe the numbers anymore. We are talking about numbers five times higher per day than what I'd been seeing for the past five years. 

I expect a little growth, sure, but this? It all seems fake, and I feel because of this, doing a post based on stat numbers I am getting, which likely are false, is not a good thing. It is artificial and misleading, I think. 

So, I am suspending the "Weekly Top Five" series and I probably will not do a "Top Ten Posts of 2025" review at the end of the year. I wish the numbers were reflective of real people reading these pages, but it seems highly unlikely this might be the case. 

Anyway..... If you ever see an AI generated story about gravel cycling which kind of sounds like I wrote it and it is not on this blog, you can probably bet it is AI. Not saying it will ever happen, but from what I am seeing on the backside of the blog, I would not at all be surprised if it were to occur.