Irony Is….

….when a site scrapes your content, and the first thing they scrape…is a post about ANOTHER site illegally scraping / copyright violation.

*blinks*

It was so meta, AAG and I couldn’t even comprehend it this morning. She found out about it only because I have lots of links in that post and someone followed a link to her site and she noticed it in her stats tracker. On the plus side, I was (after much work) able to track down the hosting provider for this site (huggingandkissing dot com) – they didn’t use somebody mainstream. Also, due to the nature of their site’s layout, the scraped posts aren’t appearing on the front pages or for that matter, easily found. They’re being put under a category listing of “news”. http://huggingandkissing.com/?cat=165¹ So keep an eye on that particular section of their site, bloggers, for your own content and your friends. I’ve already emailed about half a dozen people to let them know about it. Go here to report it: http://www.exmasters.com/about/about-contact/

I was told by the live chat agent that the “abuse” email is the one to use. I had emailed them, and then later when I found two more of mine pop up (perhaps an hour later?) the original post I’d claimed as copyright violation/scraping was already gone (but not before I got a screenshot). So while I was in live chat with this guy I gave him the direct links to my two posts and they were gone within a minute. If you can get the live chat when they’re online, it’s the quickest route.

Here’s something very interesting admitted by my chat support guy:

Lilly: If there are enough complaints, will the site get shut down?
Milo: this is first for whole time, so most probably not
Milo: also, reponsible provider is always better than e.g. chinese or russian provider, where can be the site moved after suspending by the owner
Lilly: I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that²
Milo: i mean that if we suspend the site, it can be online after 10 minutes on another provider³
Milo: so it doesn’t make any sense

Valid point. I was ultimately quite upset that HostGator outright said to me on Twitter that after a few complaints they’d take down scandalshack, but they never did. And scandalshack is STILL scraping posts.

But remember what I said in my post about them, how the reason I probably didn’t get scraped is because I’m self-hosted WP and can use plugins, specifically the one called NoMoreFrames which blocks the scraping script? Yeah, these new people are copy/pasting by hand from my feed. How can I tell? View the screenshots below, and I think you’ll understand why.

I don’t recall all of the people who got scraped in the scandalshack blowup a few weeks ago, but do any of you know if any of those being scraped showed a full feed (as opposed to partial feed which I hate)?

There’s plugins for self-hosted WP users to insert copyright protection aiding things into their RSS feed posts (just see mine as example) and I think that in Blogger now under settings you can add in your own footer for the feed, so you can add in a link to your blog, the blog name, a unique long set of alphanumeric characters, etc so that at least you can find it or others will know when they read the site that it’s been stolen. But I don’t know if there’s anything for free WP users, unless you aggregate your feed through Feedburner and they do have some options. I’m looking into finding out more.