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The Vultures Are RSS Feeding!

Yes, the vultures have been feasting on my RSS feed, and now they’re getting a little too greedy. Splogs and scrapers are becoming a problem in the blogosphere. I have recently read many complaints about article ‘theft’ on other blogs and in forums.

I have had partials of my posts stolen before, but yesterday was the first time I saw one of my posts in full on a splog. Having put the time in to hand-write content and then have someone try to pass it off as their own can set people off just a bit. Although it might not technically be illegal to take a post if the author is credited, it’s just not kosher.

Anyway, the blog hotlinked the pictures I inserted, so I decided to do a little experiment. I renamed the pictures in my post, and replaced the originals with one of these ugly-looking signs:

So now, the splog’s post looks a little something like this:

All the articles that I browsed through on the splog site were stolen from elsewhere also. There are other ways to handle content theft, but the legal process is very time-consuming…Most blogger’s do not think it is worth the effort. Care to add your two sense about autoblogs and splogging?

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2 Responses to “The Vultures Are RSS Feeding!”

1. Noddegamra Says:
   November 13th, 2007 at 9:32 am

   This is a GREAT idea!!

   Rather than going through the effort of modifying loads of posts, you can setup a hotlink service on your hosting settings. You can provide an image/URL of where hotlinked images go to. Just set that as you “article stolen” image

   I think it can also be setup in your .htaccess file

   I’ve set it up myself on my host, but I’ve set it currently to no image. I think I may go along with your idea of “article stolen”. Thanks!

2. j.blu Says:
   November 13th, 2007 at 9:39 am

   Ah! Now why didn’t I think of that? Thanks for the tip Noddegamra, I will set that up later.

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