Update June 25, 2006: The operator of the website in question asked me to remove the text references to his site. Apparently, this page is near the top of the SERPS for the company name. I don’t want to needless hurt any company and the point of this article isn’t that company X did something bad. By removing the name of the comapny I have taken none of the substance from this article and have hopefully helped some honest people continue earn their livlihood.
When I get a free moment, I often look over my server logs to see whats happening and where my traffic is actually coming from. Today I found a strange spike in traffic as shown in the image below:
The thing that is odd with those stats is that the number of ‘pages’ doesn’t equal the number of ‘hits’. In fact, often its not even that close. So I visited a couple of those pages. They look like this:
Initially, I though my logs must be wrong because I couldn’t find any obvious use of content from MaxPower. So I checked the ‘page source’ and found a whole bunch of references to maxpower.ca. Viewing the source, it appears they are scraping or have scraped a portion of one of my pages. I just can’t figure out why. What they appear to have taken is some style information and javascript calls. But then, they don’t use any of that style. Whats up with that?
According to their website:
[This company] is a premier knowledge management company specializing in the drug delivery, pharma and biotech industry. The current clients of [this company] are world leaders in pharmaceutical, biotechnology and drug delivery fields.
Dang. I didn’t realise my webdesign skills where so in demand? For a prestigious knowledge management company to use my work… flattering. Anyway, I sent them an email through their comment form. I have pasted it here for the historical record (I changed the web address to avoid direct linking, no one really needs to visit):
Hi,
I noticed that you are using the source code of my website www.maxpower.ca, on some of the pages of the domain pharmacircle.com. For example:
http://www.website.TLD/blue/welcome_page.htm
http://www.website.TLD/welcome_page.htmTwo questions:
Could you please stop? and;
Why?Thanks for your time.
This is the reply I got:
hi,
i just want to try your javascript for the links. These pages are not open to general use. You can not reach these pages through [the top level domain]. Sorry for that, i have stopped doing that.
By the way i appreciate your design.
Orphaned design pages using source code (but no style nor substance)… WTF? This story isn’t very exciting — its just weird.
25 May 06
6:42 pm
Ah, I wouldn’t worry about it. You have some great design elements, so people probably copy the code over to their own sites to figure out how it works, then replace the it with their own stuff. Now I come to think of it, my “lightbox” code (inspired by you!) is still called from someone else’s site - better fix that.
25 May 06
6:55 pm
Good point. I’m not worried, just perplexed…
26 May 06
2:03 am
Not everybody is as polite as I am to ask you about your lightbox script. They just abuse it.
By the way, thanks again for the explanation
26 Jun 06
2:45 am
Hi,
I am leader of Pharma_Circle web design and implementation team. We are really shocked to see this page on internet. First let me clarify the situation.
One of the members of our design team found an interesting design element in your website (maxpower). As I remember design element is about making the background semi-transparent for a popup and darkening the whole background. In order to test it an outer link to your website is used. We found it ostentatious and remove it before we show it to our customers. It was there not more one day as I remember and again it was not reachable from home page. /blue/welcome_page.htm and welcome_page are not being used within website and primarily created for test purposes. This semi-transparent popup is deleted but outer links are forgotten within html code. We delete them as soon as we get your email. Here there are two points to mention:
1- We did not ever use any of your codes in our website. If we liked the design element our design guy would have to rewrite to code again to make it fit to our website. This is called inspiration not abuse. For example in another part of the website we are inspired from GMail’s javascript dropdown box but after initial decision so many fixes and modifications had to be made in order to make it perfect in our case.
2- It is very annoying to find this page published on internet. I think first step should be understanding the issue well before publicly accusing someone. You get a reply immediately but it seems to be unclear. You may ask more about the issue, as you know no reference to your website was used. It is not about our business ethics but it is about ethics in general not to accuse anyone without knowing anything about the issue.
We are waiting for your reply.
26 Jun 06
7:49 am
Salutations Dogan,
This story is about strange server log activity, how I figured out what was happening, and how the situation was resolved — nothing more. This website is a learning tool for me. When I learn something about running a website, I post what I have discovered online so that others may learn too. In this case the lesson is watch your server logs, when you see strange activity, dig deeper and figure it out. By posting my story online I hope others will read it and learn to look over their server logs too.
“I think first step should be understanding the issue well before publicly accusing someone.” I have never publicly accused anybody of anything related to Pharma_Circle. Therefore, I’m not exactly sure why you feel I have accused someone ‘without knowing anything about the issue’. I’m not even sure I know what the issue is.
If I were to accuse someone of stealing that would be one thing, but I have not done so. I have reported factual verifiable information. Specifically 1) that references to maxpower were found in a source code on a strange pharmacy website, and 2) That these references caused an anomaly in the server logs. Thats it. There is no accusation, there is only fact.
Perhaps you are perplexed by the title of the post, “Strange Pharmacircle activity — copying source code?” You’ll notice that this title is a question. Its in the form of the question to illicit a response from readers. It in effect is asking readers, like yourself, if you feel that source code has been copied. I make no such judgements.
From my point of view Dogan, you are accusing me of accusing you of something — what that something is I’m not sure.
Having just now checked my email I see that you have also sent me a message. In that message you write:
“e-quality enterprise software system solutions
Accusation of Code Abuse
Please reply back to my post on [this page]
Thank you.
Written By: Ilter Tolga Dogan”
Is it ‘code abuse’ you think I have accused you of? Because that is simply not true. If anything it could be argued that there has been server abuse. Everytime one of your pages loaded, my server was pinged a number of times and bandwidth was used up — maxpower.ca got nothing out of it. Sort of like a weird version of hotlinking.
As an aside, the acronym, WTF stands for ‘what the fuck?’ This post is in MaxPower WTF category indicating, along with the other stories in this category that there is something strange going on. Other stories in this category on MaxPower include a short blurb on PPC singles advertising in Laos (seems strange yes?), a story about monkeys invading Puerto Rico, sphincter bleaching, and dog condoms (to name a few). All of these stories share the common trait of being very strange.
Thanks for your comments on this post, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any further questions.
15 Oct 06
1:58 pm
I often will look at peoples source code to find out how they do something, but if they have a file of JavaScript, I won’t link directly to it for two reasons. I don’t want to waste their bandwidth and secondly because what if their site goes down? It stops my site from working, so I don’t see why anyone would want to do that.