Attack Of The Clones: Bonkers Sees Doubly Red In A Battle With Content Scrapers

This has not been a good weekend. For starters, I unintentionally aquired an orange thatch in place of hair. It was relatively cheap as thatching goes (with it being a dying art of course), but that was no consolation. Plus I failed to sleep, failed to edge the lawn, do a food shop, polish my shoes, or catch up on back episodes of Corrie. In short, most of the household chores and pleasurable activities I had set out to accomplish this weekend went by the board. This is because I was preoccupied by the sudden discovery that a month’s worth of past posts on Bonkers had been hijacked by Israeli terrorists - or by a Tel Aviv-based "content scraper site" (to give it its proper name) – posing as a harmless RSS index directory. Yup, I had been cloned.

Now my blog is already listed on a number of “aggregator” or directory sites like Tree Hugger or Day Life, and I have no problem with any of those. On such sites just the title and a bitesize taster of your post will typically be shown. Readers have to click on the link below - which will say something like: “Full article on (Site Name)” – if they wish to carry on reading, whereupon they are routed back to the original blog post. Thanks to this “titbit”-quoting approach, RSS feed sites are no threat at all to blog owners, and may well serve as additional sources of referred traffic.

As ever, Wikipedia helpfully explains this other, bothersome phenomenon of "content" or "web scraping" – and no, I am not scraping stuff from Wikipedia, just quoting a little bit of it:

“A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping.”

One more sentence if the Wikipedia authors don’t mind, and then I am done.

“Some scraper sites are created to make money by using advertising programs.”

Too right they are! Yes, this one plonked my posts up on its site, hedged them all around with Google ads, and then sat back and watched as the revenue poured in...or maybe just trickled in, one small monetised drop at a time - who knows? Hey, it is the principle I object to, the piggybacking on someone else's time and effort in the hope of financial gain.

So I fired off a pretty stern email to the site owner, in which I came over all UPPER CASE, WHICH IS NOT LIKE ME AT ALL. I will, however, reproduce my complaint in normal text, to preempt mass eyestrain on the part of readers:

“Please take down all content from my blog, Bonkers about Perfume - you have
basically stolen my blog in its entirety for your own purposes and I will
pursue the matter further if you do not remove it from your site
immediately.”

To the site owner’s credit, he responded pretty promptly, asking me for my blog domain name and following this up with further inquiries about the exact web URL of the content I had a problem with. That said, in amongst our flurry of exchanges he couldn’t resist a defensive side swipe:

“And tobe clear we are only rss index directory (no scraping).”

And to be clear, if the lifting wholesale of material, including text and images, does not constitute scraping, I sincerely hope never to encounter a bona fide content scraper in a dark alley.

So anyway, by the end of the afternoon my blog content had been excised from the rogue site – scraped off, no less - though not without the site owner pointing out how I was in fact cutting off my SEO nose to spite my face:

“FYI to be in out site it is good for you SEO & traffice wise but it is no longer relevant for you…”

Note the suspenseful dots pointing to my ill-judged decision….

Well, as it happens, having checked them out, the content scraper’s site doesn’t appear to register on Google’s page rank scale of 0-10 whereas Bonkers is a 3, ie "off the starting blocks", you could say. (For anyone not familiar with this techie blog rating malarkey, Google page ranking is one key measure of a blog’s importance in cyberspace - for more on this see point 4 of my recent post on blogging here. So I fail to see why my ranking would be improved by an association with an unranked site, or for that matter why I would get any referred traffic to speak of, given that entire blog posts of mine were available for people to read over on the scraper site!

Not long after I sent my first tetchy email, something prompted me to click on a link on the scraper site that had previously led to my post on the Perfume Lovers London “Leather Event”; in its place I found a large chunk of what I took to be Hebrew, but at least the Bonkers blog content was gone. My thoughts immediately turned to Ari of Scents of Self, our go-to “in-perfume-community” Hebrew speaker, so I sent her the text and asked if she could confirm it was in fact Hebrew, and if so, whether she could kindly find a moment to tell me the gist. Ari was keen to help, but finding herself unfamiliar with some of the “Internet-y” terminology, she had the bright idea of running the text through Google Translate, and came up with the following:

"There is not even one character of copied content on this site. Display pages are a type of display window that broadcasts RSS within the online conversion of standard RSS to a display state that a web surfer is able to browse. And that every change that occurred in the original broadcast (feed) varies respectively in our website online. The donor site publishers with the broadcast channels are promoting Google and directing visitors. If you still want us to remove the display page of your transmission source, please contact us through the button "contact" and send us the download link."

So they would be the donor site publisher, I take it? Funny that I should feel as though I am the (unwitting) donor in all this...like those bodies harvested for organs without the prior permission of the deceased or their next of kin. And as for this business of "displaying" as opposed to "scraping", well, that is a nice point of semantics. That would also mean that pubs which screen Sky TV football matches using foreign satellite decoders are also merely "displaying" the games, rather than filching them in any more reprehensible manner.

And I find it interesting that this rather pat defensive statement should have appeared where my post had been, instead of being written in an email directly to me. I wouldn't be surprised if this was stock copy the site has got ready to bang in whenever it suddenly incurred a textual hole, as another disgruntled blog owner reclaims their material as their own.

Well, what have I learnt from this unsettling incident? Firstly, that it really does pay to make a direct approach in the first instance to the site which has copied your material, as this avoids having to seek out alternative avenues of complaint that may lie deep within the bowels of Google or Blogger. I also found out that fellow blogger My Perfume Life is being scammed in exactly the same way, and have dropped her a line to this effect. And I have proved once more that I can call upon friends in Perfume Land – even on a "sudden death" basis - for help on all manner of random topics. : - )

Lastly, I learnt (for the umpteenth time!) never to write a post on Blogspot software, even though it supposedly saves drafts as you go along. Beastly Blogger contrived to eat this post completely - or, you could say, to scratch it off the "compose" window with a single gouge of its heartless fingernails - just as I was doing a final proof. Which rather begs the question:

“Where’s the blinkin' duplicate post when you really need one?!”


And I would be interested to know if anyone else out there is aware of having been cloned, scammed or scraped in a similar fashion?

If so, did you take any action against the scrapers, or did you decide to go with the outflow? : - )


Since writing this account of my own experience, Tarleisio of The Alembicated Genie has written a powerful and moving post on the subject of content theft - see link below:

Phantoms in the Fumosphere


Photo of print scraper from drsmith7383 via Flickr CC, photo of boot scraper from sywlch via Flickr CC, other photos my own.

Another Bonkers Road Trip: Part 1 – Grote Verkeershinder And Strange Things On Poles

Grote Verkeershinder

If you were to mention Belgium and Holland to most people – including me not so long ago – a host of stereotypical (and mostly benign) images would tend to float into one’s mind: tulips, clogs, windmills, dykes, skunk, and prostitutes in windows in the case of Holland, and for Belgium perhaps moules & frites, mayonnaise, Leffe beer, Hercule Poirot, René Magritte, the Ostend ferry, and expenses-guzzling EU diplocrats.

And there is some truth in all those clichés, but having crisscrossed both countries extensively for two of the past three weeks, I have learnt that Belgium and Holland are in fact most notable for being a car park. The Antwerp ring in Belgium, which – like its UK counterpart of the M25, or its US counterpart of Houston’s Beltway 8 (sorry, but I can’t think of a nationally recognised ring road in America!) - is billed as an orbital artery of key importance to the country’s road network, facilitating traffic flows north-south and east-west. As far as I am concerned, if the Antwerp ring is an artery at all, it is a terminally furred one.

No, I would tend to say that the Antwerp ring is a malign vortex, a honey trap luring lorries and the odd unwary passenger vehicle to sticky doom, mired forever in the slow lane, going precisely nowhere. The most chilling words in the Flemish language – apart from wegomlegging (“detour”) and the phrase in the title that I take to mean “major traffic hold ups” – have to be “file mogelijk” (“queue possible”). And when you see that sign you know that it is merely being coy, and that for “mogelijk” you should read “file already ongoingijk for several hoursijk”.

The reason for this terrible congestion is I think twofold. Ownership of cars per 1000 inhabitants seems to be fairly consistent across developed European countries at about 450-550. Ah, you may say, but the population of Belgium and Holland will be relatively small compared to the UK or Germany. But the surface area of these countries is of course proportionately even smaller... So exercised was I by this conundrum that I have gone and crunched some numbers, factoring in total population, car ownership and land mass. I worked out that while the UK has 116 cars per square km and Germany 128, Belgium has 172 and Holland 182.

And to compound the problem of greater car density is the fact that many people drive through Belgium – and to some extent Holland – with a view to going somewhere else. And believe me, in my darkest moments of traffic frustration I would have done that too, had I not set up rather a lot of appointments in both countries, strung out over several weeks - and had I been able to get above second gear at the time.

I was stuck in the Antwerp ring almost more than I was out of it. On the penultimate day of the trip – having clocked a particularly entrenched patch of gridlock looming - I decided to wiggle round by the backroads through the many satellite villages just outside the city. How much slower could that be, I wondered? Answer – at least as slow. It took me two and a half hours to skirt about 20 miles south of the city. I fell foul of numerous sets of roadworks and diversions in the countryside, and countless traffic calming - as in “motorist enraging” - schemes in the villages. These typically involved speed bumps as high as a small house, reinforced by a slalom-style obstacle course deploying a cunning arrangement of bollards, skittles, flowerbeds, equestrian fences and gratuitous bits of brickwork. They were placed at such outrageously sharp angles that it was nigh on impossible to determine the left side of the road from the right – the small scraps of remaining tarmac in between the many obstructions were barely passable to any traffic other than cyclists.

Oh dear me, don’t get me started on the cyclists. Basically, they were everywhere, seemed to have right of way at all times, and I tried – somewhat halfheartedly, it must be said - not to kill any of them. To give you an idea, 27% of all journeys are made by bike in Holland compared with 1.3% in the UK and 0.9% in the USA. Belgium comes in at a respectable (and only moderately irritating) 8%.

Now if you think I am being unduly churlish about cyclists, you will be shocked to learn that I actually swore at a crocodile of small children crossing the road just ahead of me in Waregem. They filed past endlessly, two by two, in a provokingly leisurely procession. For my part, I was slightly late setting off for my afternoon appointment and sat seething at the wheel, as the children just kept coming. After a while, I couldn’t contain my frustration any more, and may have muttered the ungracious words: “F***ing get on with it, will you?” With the window open.

As it happens, my satnav struggled with the travel shenanigans too on this trip. It frequently lost its bearings in roadworks, prompting a flurry of peremptory and meaningless commands, as though it had been suddenly afflicted with Tourette’s. I ignored the device at least half of the time, not least because of its unswerving wish to direct me back to Antwerp. The voice also persisted in calling Gent “Lamb” for reasons that continue to elude me.

I would like to apologise for the very car-oriented nature of this first instalment of my travel report. The act of covering 3250 miles inevitably brought with it a morbid preoccupation with prevailing road conditions, including a deep seated urge to take a cathartic pop at the “vicious circle” that is the Antwerp ring, and so exorcise the demons of my "post Flanders traffic stress disorder". Now don't get me wrong - I did enjoy many aspects of my time in Benelux, not least a lovely weekend spent with friends - but these countries do need to sort out their transport networks. And for what it's worth, I don't think more bikes are the way to go...

Strange things on poles



On a lighter note, I noticed two strange things on poles on this trip: a condom machine in the open air in Hannover, and a Trabant car in the middle of a field north of Berlin. I had seen the Trabant some 12 years previously, and went back specially to photograph it. The stork’s nest was still in evidence on the roof, though its feathered residents were not at home. The car looked seriously in need of a lick of paint after all this while, but I sense it is unlikely to get it. I asked a local resident how the car came to be on the end of a pole in the first place – well, it is more of a small derrick in fact, than a pole – and he replied gnomically: “Ah, well, Trabants are so light you can throw them up there with one hand.”








Photo of overhead signs on the Antwerp ring from skyscrapercity.com, photo of cyclists from andrewlove.org, other photos my own.