About

This site is written by techpot, an independent developer working on bot detection and traffic-filtering tools for WordPress.

The starting point was a real six-figure-request bot-traffic investigation on a production site — sorting out which “visitors” were real, which were scrapers spoofing real browsers, and which were search-engine crawlers that just needed to be recognized correctly rather than blocked. That work turned into Lubber, a WordPress plugin that intercepts scraper and residential-proxy bot traffic before WordPress finishes loading.

This blog is where the ongoing findings from that work get written up — bot behavior seen in the wild, what detection approaches actually hold up, and what doesn’t.