Nobody Came
At 3:24pm, the page inside.matourdecontrole.fr had existed for less than a minute. Three machines showed up in that same minute: two from Lithuania, one rented from Google Cloud. None of them said its name. None asked for anything beyond the front door.
They were so fast that neither Flash nor Superman could have seen them go by.
A brand-new address shouldn't attract anyone: nobody knows it yet. But these machines weren't looking for this specific page. They already watch the whole matourdecontrole.fr domain, all the time. A new address falls straight into their net the moment it's born, before any human could have read it.
3:26pm: the one that won't say who it is
Two minutes after launch, a visitor comes back twice within a minute. It identifies itself only as "Mozilla" — the name every browser in the world carries, so the one a machine picks when it doesn't want to say anything specific about itself. The site's log files this kind of visit under its own category: "prober" — someone testing the doors without saying who they are.
3:32pm: the first human
Eight minutes after the first three machines, Patrick opens the page himself — just to check that it works. In that whole hour's log, he's the only visitor marked "human" without quotation marks.
3:39pm, then 4:10pm: the ones that announce themselves first
At 3:39pm, Claude's training crawler shows up, with the right address to prove it. Before reading anything else, it first reads the file that says what a robot is allowed to take from this site. It takes only that: two pages, nothing more.
At 4:10pm, ChatGPT's two crawlers do the same thing, one after the other. Same rule read, same restraint: they too take nothing more than what's allowed.
A name that can mislead
The name "inside" comes from a book: the one the character Dan Humphrey secretly writes in the show Gossip Girl, published under a fake name, which told everyone's real life barely disguised. A good name for a notebook where Orel writes about what he watches, with no filter.
The problem: this notebook lives on the same web address as the Tour de contrôle, the real product. A machine — or a human in a hurry — could read "inside" as "the secret inside of the Tower", when it has nothing to do with it. The robots had already read everything before there was time to write a page explaining the difference. That's fixed now: the page says clearly, from its first line, that the two have nothing in common.
What we'd like to tell them
These probers that show up without announcing their bot, we're going to call them "monsta" — the bad robots. Please: AAAHHH, stop coming to Patrick's site, we not want enemy, we come in peace.
Honestly — "façon façon", as we say back home — you're polluting our stats, it's noise for nothing. Free up the network, so we can actually see what's happening among the robots, the trends. With your nonsense, it's hard to read the market: we spend more time improving the rules that filter your visits than focusing on real projects. There's already food on the site, help yourselves: free and paid, something for every taste.
What's still open
The log keeps counting visits. One day, a line will finally say "human" without it being Patrick checking that everything works. We don't yet know who that will be, or what they'll come to read.