First kill, woot!

Background:

If you’ve been following my Twitter, you know I recently lashed out against a scraper who was stealing our content, removing the copyright link from the feed, and hotlinking our images. In the past, I had tolerated scrapers because as long as they kept the copyright link, the effort of fighting scrapers outweighed the benefits.  Fighting against scrapers in the real world usually centers around making sure everyone knows that your site is the real source of the content, tracking who is scraping your content, and making the scrapers want to take your content off their site.  DMCA’s are, in my experience, useless because of the high burden placed on the victim and the ability of the scraper to simply ignore the DMCA.  Even though “it’s obvious” which site is the source, ISPs and webhosts don’t want to make tht call or do the research.  Furthermore, I didn’t want to turn off hotlinking or switch to summaries, because that screws with legit fans reading our posts in feed-readers. Fortunately, rather than use a whitelisting strategy, one can use a blacklisting strategy against specific scrapers.

Sorry Raichu, but no amount of crying will wash the image from your mind's eye

The strategy I used has been employed before against hotlinkers, but (compared to some other types of blogs) anime blogs have an advantage against scrapers in that the images are both numerous in and very important to the post. Most scrapers simply hotlink because it’s easy, and this makes them vulnerable to .htaccess protection that switches out the image they were trying to steal for the image of your choosing.

Fighting Back:

The process is quite simple.  Create a .htaccess file with the below code, and upload it to the directory where your images reside (probably /wp-content/uploads).  It will protect all your sub-directories, too.

# Stop Hotlinking
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?animeblogonline\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?resuck\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?anime1\.info/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?kokidokom\.wordpress\.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ http://annoying_image_of_your_choosing.jpg [L]

You can add as many sites as you want.  Notice you have to use the backslash to escape the periods in the URL of the Rewrite Condition.  Remember to insert your own URL for the image you want to redirect the scraper to.  I think you may have to match image formats, to avoid confusing the browser.  Depending on what FTP program you are using, you may have to name the file htaccess.txt, upload it, and then rename it to .htaccess to get the file to upload correctly.

Additional Thoughts:

Target acquired

You can redirect the scraper to hotlink the disgusting image or an annoying blinking image on someone else’s site. I’ve seen first-hand that nice warning images do not stop scrapers, as they don’t have any problems stealing animeblogger.net posts and images.  Blinking animated images are supremely annoying and don’t get curious readers into trouble. 

This hotlink protection is a good tool in limiting the damage scrapers can do to you.  There is not much you can do to protect your RSS feed without hurting your regular visitors, but this method prevents scrapers from stealing your bandwidth.  It’s also a good way to show any readers that happen upon the scraper site that the scraper site is a phony (although it is usually fairly easy to tell and this is less of a concern in most cases).  Redirecting to deeply disturbing or explicit pictures (hosted elsewhere, of course) is extremely cruel but gives you the option of complaining to the scraper’s webhost that they were displaying material that violates the webhost’s TOS.  This is pretty toxic stuff, but sometimes you have to fight poison with poison (one of my favorite Iron Monkey quotes).

The best part about the .htaccess redirect is that it only serves up the nasty stuff to the specific sites you mention, so rather than build a wall that keeps a lot of people out, you defend yourself by dropping laser-guided bombs on your enemies.  Plus, scrapers often have to remove the defaced posts manually, and the lazier they were in the first place, the harder your images will be to remove.  I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed watching the scraper that inspired this article try to remove our posts one by one, only to get shut down by WordPress before the horror had been completely exorcised.

Suddenly, the Uncommon Uses feature in Feedburner becomes so much more useful.  Most scrapers don’t credit the author anyway, so this process might not ruin your good name as quickly as you think.  Is this childish?  Yes.  Is it deeply satisfying and amusing?  Yes.

Related posts:

1. Learning to Love RSS
2. Two More Reasons To Give Thanks
3. Love Slugs

This post was written by...

Kabitzin – who has written 1940 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.

One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.