Developer finds 'real reading' metric fired exclusively by bots, never humans

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An independent developer running a small personal website built two custom analytics events — one tracking 15 seconds of page time and another tracking 50% scroll depth — to distinguish genuine readers from automated scrapers. After reviewing the full event history, they found that all recorded triggers came from bots, with nine sessions reporting an impossible 1600×1600 square screen resolution and a zh-CN language tag, while the developer's own test sessions accounted for the rest. The site has logged zero confirmed human reading events since launch. The developer identified a core methodological flaw: the events were validated only against known positives (themselves reading the page) and never against known negatives, allowing bot activity to go undetected. They have since corrected the error in their tools and published the raw session data, urging other developers to validate engagement metrics against known negatives, not just expected positive cases.

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