· August 9, 2007 at 6:51 am · Personal, Web Development
I made my battle with feed scrapers a few weeks back pretty widely known. It is a pain in the rear to deal with, and personally I feel sorry for anybody who has to deal with it on a day to day basis. Nobody likes having their content stolen and re-published elsewhere.
Since then I got a lot of good advice from a lot of people. The thing that seems to have worked the best was the RSS Signature plugin for WordPress.
Here is a little more about the plugin from the developer:
That’s a great question. Sig2feed’s primary goal is to provide a simple administration interface to allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or © copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds. You can add any kind of message, tag, or even images — as long as it can be displayed in an RSS feed, it’s up to you. Cool huh?
After installing it on all my WordPress run web sites I have noticed the feed scraping has died down again to a minimum. When all is said and done, it just works. The plugin gives you an easy to understand options page where you can insert any copyright message of your choice - and then places it at the end of each of your RSS feed items.
If your looking for a suggestion to tame down the content stealing bandits - give the RSS Signature plugin for WordPress a shot.
· July 24, 2007 at 5:56 am · Hot Web Topics, Web Development
I don’t like having my stuff stolen or abused. Unlike most folks though that just roll over and take it - I like to do my best to fight back.
If nobody fights back against these guys, they win and we all have to pay the price for it. I recently found one web site that will go un-named (no reason to give these guys free press) stealing content from my podcast, WebHostingShow.com. Here is the un-edited version of his responses. I sent the first e-mail asking for the content to removed and for him to respond within five days or less.
Not totally out of the question - right? Here is his reply:
Hello Mr. Keller, we are not using site webhostingshow.com for these news, than using rss feeds from domaintools.com. And under every message there is your name and your email - notice to people that YOU have written those texts. So, please see with domaintools.com are using their rss feeds are legal or not.
Oh so they are saying it’s DomainTools.com that is stealing my content - not them. Hu? Yeah didn’t make much sense to me either - the DomainTools.com folks are a great team of people, not like this idiot who can’t even spell my name correctly. I replied trying to clarify, here is the next response:
Mr Keeler, we are using material that domaintools.com provides via rss feeds for free. So I do not see any copyright abuse. If you think this material is copyrighted, please contact domaintools.com first. If they remove your blogs from their site, they will be automatically removed from our site, too.
Oh so all content published via RSS feeds are free for the taking, happy I got that cleared up.. no wait, it is still my copyrighted material I did not give him permission to post. That is the fact plain and simple - so yet again I try to explain the situation and ask for some clarification.
Wish I could say this story had a happy ending, but afraid thus far it is not looking that way.
