Comments on: Victory In My Battle Against Feed Scraping Content Thief 4Comedy.com (Updated)

by: Webmaster-Source » » Webmaster Articles Blog Carnival - July 18, 2007 Edition

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 16:40:34 +0000

[…] Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane’s Humor Blog presents Victory in My Battle Against Feed Scraping Content Thief 4Comedy.com. I recommend reading this. Feed scraping blogs are becoming increasingly common, and I believe it’s safe to say that most bloggers don’t like them. […]

by: Kai's personal space

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 11:02:03 +0000

The Blogger’s Mardi-gras…

Welcome to the July 2, 2007 edition of bloggers mardi gras. We have a wonderful mixed bag this month and lots of great, and interesting reading for y’all to read. Over the coming months we’re going to be going on a small blog tour of…

by: VoIP Lowdown » Carnival of Emerging Technologies #4

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 13:25:01 +0000

[…] Madeleine Begun Kane presents Victory In My Battle Against Feed Scraping Content Thief 4Comedy.com posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog. Madkane emerged victorious in her battle against the one of the RSS feed scraping content thieves. The issue is technical. A must read for everyone. […]

by: madkane

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:30:04 +0000

Quixote, thanks for sharing your saga. So glad it had a happy ending!

Jayne, it’s always nice to meet another humor blogger. So glad you found my info helpful. And thanks for sharing your image solution.

by: JayneM

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:01:30 +0000

That’s great to know!

I had a site that the entire thing was being stolen by a scraper. It was a ratings and reviews site with lots of images, so I was able to go into my control panel and block any off-site website from using images from my domain.

It didn’t stop them stealing content, but it made their pages look like crap because each one had 50+ broken image links all over it. LOL

Wow… came here because I’d searched for humor blogs (I have one too) and found some really useful information! Thanks!

by: quixote

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:37:41 +0000

My old blog used to be on blogspot, and that was the one being snaffled. I complained to the site’s ISP, Google, the works. The ISP at least answered messages, for what that was worth. Google was too busy even for that. I couldn’t have done an htaccess file. (When I saw that solution I had a big “DOH!” moment. Why didn’t I think of that? I should’ve known.)

However, I was moving my blog to wordpress on my own site anyway when all this flared up because I didn’t care for the way all the Big Players terms of service were trending. (I.e. you own your work, but we can use it whenever we like for whatever we like.)

So all I could think to do with the old stuff on blogspot was to replace everything with a message that the content was being stolen, and then stick my head in the sand. (It works amazingly well. I can see why the Shrub does it all the time.)

As for my Wordpress blog, after reading this, I raced right over and installed Antileech. I also felt optimistic enough to check on the scrape feeders … and, lo and behold, they’re off the web. Error 404, site not found. Woot!

by: madkane

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:46:08 +0000

Jonathan, thanks so much for the info and offer. I’ll keep it all in mind … while I’m keeping my fingers crossed that 4Comedy.com remains out of commission. In the meantime, I’ve added your site to the post’s resource list.

Paul, you’re welcome, and thanks.

Keith, thanks. Yes it’s very odd that they’ve left all their data hanging out there.

Quixote, you’re very welcome. I’m so sorry to hear you’ve had similar problems and wish you luck solving them. I hope what I did works for you. Please let me know how you make out.

Thanks Batocchio and you’re welcome.

by: Batocchio

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 22:10:20 +0000

Cool! Congratulations, and thanks for the info!

by: quixote

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:18:28 +0000

madkane, thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ve had (am having?) the same thing happen. I too got the asinine “here, spend your life assembling paperwork for us to throw out” bullshit.

Unlike you, who found something intelligent to do about it, I just got depressed. I’ve been trying to avoid finding out whether the creeps stealing my content are still doing it or not.

There’s one aspect of it all that doesn’t matter to anyone but me, but that doesn’t stop it from depressing me even more. I’m sure these jerks are using my content purely as coherent filler to prevent their linkfarm from being easily blocked. Real sentences work better than word salad. So, here’s all my carefully thought out and brilliant social commentary and it’s not even being stolen because it’s so good. It’s stolen purely for stuffing. Adding insult to injury!

Well, now you’ve given me something effective to do, and I can’t tell you how much better I feel. As I said, thank you.

by: Keith

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 15:39:42 +0000

If you visit http://4comedy.com/ now [2007-06-12, 15:39 GMT] you get a list of files. It’s a typical WordPress install. All the directories I tried are open to listing. They really ought to fix that and deny directory listing. Until they do, happy fishing.