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I also do freelance design and usability via dejligt.com

Anti Feed-Scraper Message Plugin For WordPress [Updated November 09]

    15:25 on July 24, 2009 , ,

Anti-Feed-Scraper-Message.png

Anti-feed-scraper plugin is a really simple plugin which helps you give the so-called “feed scraper bots” a hard time.

A feed scraper is a script that explores various XML feeds and bluntly copies content in various categories. The purpose, I assume, is to create a useless ghost-blog with faux contents, either because the bot-puppeteer was lazy or in shady attempts to collect Google juice.

Anti-feed-scraper makes your posts somewhat harder to scrape, by appending a little message to the end of all your posts. Because this message appears in the body text of your posts (only in the RSS feeds of course), it’s hard to filter out by the scrape bots. Which means if the lazy puppeteers keep stealing your content, they’ll steal it complete with links to your original content as well.

Download

Download from WordPress.org

The plugin features an options page where you can configure your post message.

Options

In the options page, you can customize the message appended to your feeds. The default is:

[postname] originally appeared on [sitename] on [postdate].

Available “magic tags” include:

  • [postname]
  • [sitename]
  • [postdate]
  • [tweetthis]

Comment

Pings

  1. Trying Anti Feed-Scraper Message Plugin For Wordpress » Dunia Buku

Comments

  1. Ulf says:
    July 24, 2009 at 15:42  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Thanks. This is pretty useful to me.

  2. James John Malcolm says:
    July 24, 2009 at 16:17  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Excellent.

  3. Joen says:
    July 25, 2009 at 10:13  (Quote)  (Reply)

    What are you considering using it for, if I may ask so bluntly?

  4. Joen says:
    July 25, 2009 at 14:03  (Quote)  (Reply)

    That came out slightly wrong.

    I did not mean to imply your content isn’t scrapeworthy. What I meant to say was that “pretty useful” sounds like you intend to use it for something other than “anti scraping”?

  5. Ulf says:
    July 25, 2009 at 15:18  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Joen: That came out slightly wrong.I did not mean to imply your content isn’t scrapeworthy. What I meant to say was that “pretty useful” sounds like you intend to use it for something other than “anti scraping”?

    :D

    I’m currently considering letting other sites (libraries and such) use our content on their sites (under a Creative Commons license). The automatic link back in the feed saves me a lot of work. ;)

    And yes, the site is going CC by-sa in a short while – just need the “go ahead” from two of the contributors (and if they don’t give that, we go ahead anyway, just without their contributions). All the major contributors have given permission.

    Of course, this will make working together with ComicWiki even easier, with the two sites sharing license and all.

  6. Joen says:
    July 25, 2009 at 15:26  (Quote)  (Reply)

    That sounds sweet. Free forever!

  7. Ulf says:
    July 25, 2009 at 20:40  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Damn straight! :)

  8. James John Malcolm says:
    July 26, 2009 at 13:29  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Hmmm, doesn’t seem to work for me though. It should show up in:
    http://james.gameover.com/index.php/feed/rss2/
    right?

    As far as I can see I don’t have any other plugins messing around with the rss (and the feedburner link I use instead of the one above shouldn’t matter) just a few which go through the content as it’s displayed on the site itself.

  9. Joen says:
    July 26, 2009 at 14:53  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Actually, it looks like it’s working just fine for you.

    Remember, there’s both an excerpt and a body text in your feed (description and content:encoded respectively). The excerpt, since it’s cropped anyway, doesn’t get the message. The content encoded does. The excerpt is what you see when you view the feed in Firefox. But when you “view source” of the feed, you’ll see this:

    
Vertically centring in css (without hacks and multi-line enabled) originally appeared on Candy by James on 18:07.
  10. baron says:
    July 26, 2009 at 17:34  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Works great, thank you

  11. James John Malcolm says:
    July 26, 2009 at 17:57  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Ha! You’re right, my apologies, I missed it going through the code.

    Seems Feedburner was playing up, think it’s the Great Google change-over.

  12. Joen says:
    July 26, 2009 at 19:16  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Perhaps you were looking at a cached version in Feedburner.

  13. James John Malcolm says:
    July 27, 2009 at 21:57  (Quote)  (Reply)

    That, of course, is a very good possibility, and now I feel even sillier for bothering you with it.

  14. Joen says:
    July 27, 2009 at 22:21  (Quote)  (Reply)

    Found this plugin in my rummagings:

    http://www.maxpower.ca/wordpress-plugin-digital-fingerprint-detecting-content-theft/2006/09/25/

    apparently it inserts a digital fingerprint into all your posts, so you can detect scraped content. Call that an alternative to this.

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