Who the heck is this cheeky so-and-so? Someone going by the name of ‘refekt’ has thrown up a WordPress blog with half-a-dozen or so of my blog postings under their own name! They even gone so far as to reproduce the markup I used as well as the blog being one of my themes.
The blog is at podzice.com. The domain is owned by Chi-Tak Chow of whitewater, WI.
I’ve contacted the hosting service and cc-ed the Administrative Contact for the domain. Alas the latter bounced immediately.
update 1:20am: Here’s another one. www.golig.com/wp This time just taking the headlines and first few words, presumably to have some content to experiment with.
Update 26/06/2005: I’ve had no response from either the owner or the hosting company and there are a couple of new stories on there now (neither are mine). So I went ahead and registered on his blog (you have to register in order to comment). I’ve left a polite comment on each of the 8 or 9 posts which have been stolen from me. They are flagged for moderation, I await a response.
Resolved! 26/06/2005: Chris Parkerson at his hosting company has removed the posts with my content! Great. Thanks Chris!
I also got a separate email from the owner of the site explaining he had given posting privileges to the guy who was responsible and won’t be doing that again.
Little f**ker! Good luck taking him down!
That is such bullcrap… These kind of people are complete retards… I hope you added a trackback to each and every post they made that was stolen…
That’s how popular you are now. Your content are being taken may mean that they are good. No I know why no one takes my content; they are crappy.
You should post it to Pirated Sites (http://pirated-sites.com)… Bring on the shame.
Wow…that’s really low. However, thanks to the WP dashboard, every wordpress user who regularly checks those links and is attracted to titles involving short sentences with interesting punctuation knows about it. I think you’re going to get this resolved fairly easily.
Mike,
I wonder if the name podzice.com has something to do with the plagiarism of Podz’ blog about 2 months ago. Somebody in Blogger literally mirrored his entire blog. His complaints to Blogger were discarded. Make sure you don’t get penalised for duplicates. If only there was a God, all spammers would have burned in h*ll.
Firefox is showing the little orange RSS icon for this page so I’m guessing you do publish a feed. In which case, your every entry is very possibly being reproduced in full over on LiveJournal unless you took the trouble to block them with robots.txt or they haven’t noticed your blog – and I bet there are plenty of other such sites. These two are just amoebas in comparison.
You might also wish to look at this one from yesterday:
http://www.affiliatetip.com/blog/archives/inside_scoop_of_what_google_thinks_of_affiliates.html
Found this post via the WordPress dashboard. Why do people do such stupid things? I notice the domain name contains Podz’s name too. As for blog content, why can’t they use ‘lorem ipsum’ like the rest of us? Good luck getting it sorted.
This happened to Owen not too long ago. This individual (or individuals) may be specifically targeting WordPress users (or, at the very least, those listed in PlanetWordPress).
From the looks of it I’d say it’s a link spammer. All the “articles” are posted without “ref=nofollow” in the tags. So somebody probably wrote an automated script to fill bogus weblogs and get google ranking.
RipperHunting.com
The copyrights first of all, even thou the community wants the network or software resource free.
If we all not respect them those are the conseguence
Hi Bill,
I know it’s not from my RSS feed because the dates on the stories are wrong.
Everyone,
thanks for your messages of support. Hopefully this will be resolved quickly.
Mike
Mike, so it’s not from your feed directly. Why does that make it different or worse than what LiveJournal and other sites do? I’m trying to understand the anger you and other people leaving comments feel since I have a few (about six) automated pages on my site that do similar republishing on specific topics. Further, look at all the RSS republishing plugins that people have written for WordPress – why do you think they’re okay but this use of your material is malicious?
Ooh. That’s just creepy.
Hi Bill,
I’m cross because this person has taken my stories and then put his own name to them. There is no indication that someone else wrote the articles at all. He explicitly says “by refekt” on each of the stories.
Only the theme credits me.
He doesn’t seem to be attempting to make money or anything, but uncredited reproduction in full is plain and simple theft.
Mike
I have to agree with John here. These are called scraper sites, using other peoples work to generate content quickly in google used for spamming.
Got to love these scumbags.
definitely a retarded thing to do (on his part). I hate people like that :X
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Bill, imported content must always be put in quotes, quoted in part and with a link, e.g.:
http://www.seofiles.com/google-bourbon-revisited-archive.html
I’ve removed his comments That I’ve saw in this blog as well told him about his actions 1, more issue about this and I shall remove his Hosting , Hes on final frounds,
issue resolved I hope Mike?
also a added on comment, I’ve seen no where on this domain to show that there are “copyright violations other then the post themselfs” as there are copyrighted by “mikelittle” on the website,as I also must note podzice@podzice.com (isn’t the admin/author) anymore he has given full adminship to Jason Briggs (smackzor@yahoo.com) I’ve been in contact with both for many hrs to resolve this issue as its a concern to me
so issue is resolved peacefully
Surely by linking to this clown he has achieved much more notoriety than if you had just quietly notified his host. I mean despite that you have since got resolution I’ve just followed the link from the wordpress dashboard and then been intruiged and gone to podzice.com! I admit that you didn’t make it a link… but I still had to go and take a peek!
Sorry I hope you don’t think I’m being rude by posting this out of the blue. It just all seemed so strange, I felt the need to join in!
Google has gotten out of control and spawned all this nonsense. By encouraging this behavior I think they are partially responsible for it. Podz now has a link to an interesting tool on his site. Wonder if it will do any good. My mother always said locks only keep honest people out anyway.
Here’s the link:
http://www.copyscape.com/
Goldfish,
As I mentioned in my update, the website owner had allowed someone else posting rights on his blog, and it was that person responsible.
Joni, I think in this case, as there were no adverts on the site, I can’t fathom any advantage that could have been gained.
Still, it seems to be sorted out now.
Mike
He may have taken the stolen articles down, but he still has the definition of “journal” at the top left and “daily thoughts, babblings, and random synapse firings!” under the name of his blog.
They say immitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Sadly, I have only found it to be irritating at best!
Dude, you’re giving the “mentally challenged” a bad name — the “poster” who did this is just an a$$hat.
I’m glad to hear it was all sorted out…now, I noticed a commenter played the “RSS feed” card and I just want to say, I provide the feeds as a convenience for my readers — not so someone can aggregate my content to gain Google rankings.
There _is_ a difference…