Go Antileech! It’s great:
en.bitacle.org/v/445z-txl7did0/well-to-tell-you-the-truth-we-do-things-a-little-differently-here-.html
en.bitacle.org/v/446z-txl7did0/a-b-c-d-i-j-k-m-m-z-.html

Have you heard about Numly.com? They allow you to register your works online and return a verifiable Numly Number for proof of copyright submission. To my knowledge, sploggers do not strip their Numly Numbers from their posts. This provides proof of where they picked up the original copyrighted post.

This way there is a central place to pull splog information and possibly responses that get them pulled from the network.

I’ve been working on a web crawler designed to locate splogs, fraud and phising sites. If anyone wants to help build such a site I’d be willing to contribute the data found. I still have work to do on the code so there’s nothing to show yet.

Wayne

Ooooo thats dirty (and clever). Thanks for giving the straight goods on using feedburner together with antileech. Plagiarism Today author Jonathan Bailey was told that FeedBurner was working on methods of blocking IP’s — who knows if they will come through.

And I agree with you that mistakes can happen regarding serving up poison content and that there needs to be some mechanism to allow people to report it. However, if this was impossible, I would still use AntiLeech because the benifts far outweigh the potential drawbacks.

BTW AntiLeech protected this post from a splog already. I’ll post the details later.

A funny story. When I first posted the plugin, I pointed at Val’s site, and she was livid about her stolen content. She wrote out complicated instructions for blocking Bitacle using methods built into the Apache server, which are less resource intensive and more thorough than my plugin. But in the process, she included my home IP address in the list of IPs that Bitacle uses. Why? Because I had used her site to test her rules (with her knowledge), and she had gathered all of the IPs in her server log from the Bitacle bot, which I was impersonating.

The next day I was browsing the web at home, and found a few sites that I could no longer access. Funny how information travels.

So, bottom line: Yes, it’s possible (although rare) that you feed the wrong content to someone you know. Be sure they have a way to contact you and let you know about the problem.

FeedBurner and AntiLeech

I’ll say it explicitly: FeedBurner absolutely does harm performance of AntiLeech, even when using AntiLeech’s methods to redriect to FeedBurner. Why?

FeedBurner essentially scrapes, reformats, and republishes your content just like a splogger would, except you’ve (usually) asked them to. Because of that, there is no way for AntiLeech to embed a proper image tag into the FeedBurner output for tracking bots that steal your content from FeedBurner.

If you are not using FeedBurner, I suggest that you add FeedBurner to your list of excluded user-agents, because this has now become a way that sploggers are using to circumvent your protections. They sign your feed up for a FeedBurner account, then use FeedBurner to indirectly scrape your content for them.

FeedBurner really needs to add protections to its service for people who want to use it. When asked via email about adding this feature, their response was not encouraging.