Hello, bots!

As someone accustomed to posting to social media posts with zero engagement, I'm struck by the recent amount of new subscribers. All these new members have some common traits:

• Custom email domain
• Wordpress blogs
• Industry domains

I'm not saying these new members aren't real, but I am highly skeptical. When I saw a new subscriber notification in my inbox, I thought it was for another blog I host for a friend. I was genuinely surprised that someone had decided to sign up for my email notifications.

My first thought was that these accounts were trying to infiltrate my servers. Thoughts like these permeate my security engineer brain. As a result, I rebooted my machine and upgraded my docker images in an attempt to thwart an attacker trying to gain a foothold into my server.

The second thought I had was these accounts are looking to cross promote. This seems the most likely scenario. They (and you reading this) are probably a bot used to juice engagement to your website. By evaluating the likelihood that my post meets some Venn diagram of relevance, your bot can find opportunities to cross promote while masking as organic engagement. To that I say, welcome. 😛

This influx of membership did have the unintended consequence of prodding me to write another post.