Site content reads/views/stats inflating over recent days

As per an earlier topic, the site over the last few days has been subject to many 'bots' (1000s) visiting our content with the main purposes being to scrape content

This 'massive' rise in bots is more than likely due to the rise of AI services and their need for content, no matter what it is, for learning, training and so on

While this scraping may be useful for ai services, it does unfortunately have a effect on the site, mainly on the sites performance but also on our page/item views/stats, which as you may have seen, have caused our views/reads to have been inflated greatly over the last few days

Work is ongoing to try and deal with this, both now and for the future, such as the blocking of ai bots, making some features members only etc etc

however there is no easy way to undo the inflation that we have seen say eg100s of views turing into 1000s

Work and such is still ongoing but thought post up a quick note just so you are aware of current score and what's behind the rise of 'views'

mike