Bad case bombing 🔠🔡

I have a stats page

The stats aren't usually very interesting. But I noticed that a couple of new entrants in the Top URLs section - gemlog posts I made recently. Except the URLs don't work. The stats script isn't broken. I'm really getting lots and lots of requests for those pages but with the wrong case.

gemini://freeshell.de/gemlog/2022-02-27_re__documenting_projects__and_a_question_.gmi (doesn't work)

gemini://freeshell.de/gemlog/2022-02-27_Re__Documenting_Projects__and_a_question_.gmi (that's better - notice capitals)

So I poked in the logs. Maybe I could help someone with a dodgy crawler to fix a bug. Nope, it looks like the requests came from IPs that resolve to "tor-exit-41.example.com" and similar, so it's anonymous.

Now I'm puzzled. Why would someone request a page with the wrong casing? And when they get "51 Not Found", why would they carry on requesting it so many times that it's in my top 20 URLs?

If it's you, please would you stop?

Now if only I were hosting the capsule on Windows, the problem would go away. 😉

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