Sploggers and Content Thieves, Oh My! — Comment Spam
The daily frustrations of operating a news web site.
What you see on Reglike is only half the story. In addition to churning out content, I spend much of my time battling sploggers who rip off content, trackback spammers, comment spammers, and other nefarious activities.
Sploggers – this is one of my pet peeves. Splogs are blog sites that rip off other content, mostly from RSS feeds. Some splogs are “legal” in that they take a few lines from your story and then link to it; that’s fine. Others are not legal; they copy entire articles. I’ve come across many splogs that show Reglike’s entire posts, counting the copyright notice at the bottom! You can track people splogging you using FairShare.
Trackback Spammers – even more annoying are the sploggers who then automatically ping your articles. Ironically, these trackbacks help you track sploggers.
Comment Spammers – Most of these comments are from automated systems that find your posts and add spammy, link-ridden comments. Thankfully, Askismet Spam for Wordpress catches most of these. But comment spammers are getting tricky. I get a lot of comment spam like this:
“That was a great post…I love this site…Thanks”
“I’ve been reading your site for a while. Great job. Keep up the good work!”
“I hope there’s good info here. It’s my first time on this forum [sic].”
Sometimes these comments include URLs in the body, but other times it’s just in the comment poster’s information, which is then hyperlinked.
Then there are the commentors who write “I found your post through [insert my web site address here] and…” They actually write a real comment, but they include a gratuitous link at the beginning.
Non-attributing content stealers – I made up this category, but this is a web site that basically steals your content, paraphrases it, and doesn’t attribute it to you. There’s a site in the domain industry like that – DomainNews.com (note: not DomainNameNews). I wouldn’t call them out here except that apparently my two emails to them haven’t gotten through. They basically read your stories, change the title a little bit, paraphrase some of it, maybe copy a line or two verbatim from your site, and then don’t give you credit. For example, here are some recent Reglike headlines followed by similar headlines on DomainNews:
Reglike: Denver Nuggets and Jim Carrey Fight for Domain Names
DomainNews.com: DenverNuggets.com and JimCarrey.com domain names disputed
Reglike: Salesforce.com Registers 21 Trademarked Domain Names
DomainNews.com: Over 20 trademarked domain names registered by Salesforce.com
Reglike: A Wacky Domain Dispute in Orange County
DomainNews.com: Interesting domain arbitration case in Orange County
In fact, if you have a site on Domaining.com, you’ll likely find some oddly similar articles on DomainNews.com
What you ought to know – sometimes DNW’s comment system throws out good comments. If you comment and see the message “your comment is awaiting moderation”, then I’ll get to it soon. If you submit a comment and it just disappears, then it’s probably in the spam folder and will be deleted. In this case e-mail me the comment and I’ll approve it.
