So, if you have been following the Anime Nano forums, you have heard about that bastard Tubeless. It’s been tough work just trying to work around his scraping, but at least I got his Technorati account marked for deletion. We love you too, Tubeless.
Since Tubeless recently (like a week ago) set up a Technorati account and linked to it on his site, I wanted to at least do something to piss him off. So I used the contact form on Technorati and sent them a complaint; they actually replied in just a few hours. I got the following email from their VP of Engineering:
Thanks for the report. We’ve marked this site for deletion in our indexes. It will take some time for this change to propagate through our system, but the blog and post content will eventually be expunged from our system.
It’s one thing to scrape feeds, but this guy has been changing all the reference links to say that the original post came from Bakaserv. He’s also been hard at work getting more ads on his site. At least this is one small victory against the splogging bastard.
7 Comments
As we like to say back home: Scolding represents affection, a good thrashing represents love. Much love and affection for tubeless!
Such people suck bad
I kept wondering why Tubeless disappeared somehow, but now I know why. It’s a shame idiots like him exist on the internet.
So you’re basically following Takamachi Nanoha’s philosophy of making friends? ^^;
Cheers.
Anyone ever notice that Nanoha only ends up being friends with other cute girls? If you are not a cute “villain”, all you get is a Starlight Breaker to the face. I think Zafira is the only exception to this, and he can change into a dog; plus I think he was part of a package deal (or Arf negotiated this).
I was attacked by a very odd scrapper “mark” and 120host.net. He is registered in Germany and hosted in Hungary. If I had money for lawers, I would attack his registrar and had his domain pulled. I know corps do that and Go Daddy in particular is amenable. Hey, dirty tactics against dirty people.
Complaining to Technorati is a good idea, but does anyone actually use them? I wish there was a way to complain to Google.
I went through forums and there was this issue of scrapping through the secondary feed. Well… Don’t have secondary feeds, then. In any case, the issue does not apply to me, I don’t expect to be seen at Anime Nano any time soon.
Being stuck at LJ limits my options in fighting 120host.net, but I have a plan, which involves independent hosting and one-time poisoning.
If it makes you feel any better, the rest of us do not have many weapons to combat scrapers either. The RSS is almost impossible to protect in any way. The only real way to fight is to go to the source of the website and the ad revenue so that the scraper gets annoyed and leaves your site alone. Hopefully this problem gets solved soon, but I’m not sure how it would work.
As for Technorati, I personally don’t use it very often, but I think it still does have a lot of loyal visitors. They recently redesigned the page, hopefully without Tubeless =D.