blog/planet scrapers

[Alan Pope]

On 6 March 2010 22:35, Nicholas Ng <nbliang at gmail.com> wrote:
> The site owner has taken the site down. Not sure whether he will get
> the site up again with some improvements or not, but we do hope so as
> the site might be useful for others.
>

Its certainly useful for whoever runs it, for generating revenue
without spending time and effort creating any content whatsoever!

The site rips all the planet.ubuntu.com blogs (and probably other
planets too) eating bandwidth (by hotlinking to images), and
generating social bookmarking links such as this one which link back
to _them_ and _not_ the original poster.

http://twitthis.com/twit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fubuntu.kelate.com.my%2Farchive%2F2010%2F03%2F07%2Fwhich-podcasts&title=Which%20Podcasts%3F

http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fubuntu.kelate.com.my%2Farchive%2F2010%2F03%2F07%2Fwhich-podcasts

http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=Which%20Podcasts%3F&uri=http%3A%2F%2Fubuntu.kelate.com.my%2Farchive%2F2010%2F03%2F07%2Fwhich-podcasts

Personally I'd like all these kinds of site shut down, but as fast as
they get shutdown someone else starts up another one. Many people have
complained over the years about the rss feed from planet ubuntu being
aggregated elsewhere, and I don't mind that. What is irritating is
that they're covering it with adverts (generating revenue on someone
else's content _without_ their permission) and eating their bandwidth.

As I run my own apache instance I have in the past considered
'countermeasures' which will cause problems for sites that do this
(such as replacing hotlinked images when referrers are unwanted with
massively irritating/offensive images to prove a point to the owner)
but at the end of the day I don't because it's more hassle than it's
worth.

In my opinion the site owner (and any other site owner who does this)
is, in a nutshell, rude.

Al.