Check this out, peeps

Mr Apricot · 2014-08-01 11:52:29

http://www.shopathomecom.com/

You are actively being scraped, draining your resources and just purely ripping off your forum word for word.

They used to do another forum, but having been tracking them for a while, I have noticed they are now doing this site. Only signed up to let admins know.

Cheers.

colak · 2014-08-01 12:05:23

Thanks. All admins moderators, please do not delete this post as our devs should check this out.

Mr Apricot · 2014-08-01 12:11:04

No problem, if you need some more info, feel free to PM me for Skype. We got rid of them a couple months back.

Good luck.

uli · 2014-08-01 12:30:45

Researching this I found three more sites pirating our contents and, even worse, two of those are infected by malware, that’s at least what my FF extension Trafficlight tells me.

DO NOT VISIT THE FOLLOWING URLs:
truyenhinh24.com/surf.aspx
forumtextpattern.stpsq.com/

The third one is not (yet) infected
apps.grupovideobase.net/proxy/index.php

As the Google search term I entered “Suggesting and discussing features you’d like to see added to the core in future Textpattern CMS releases” (in apostrophes) and looked for the last ones.

uli · 2014-08-01 12:40:07

Four more with Latest official Textpattern project news from the core development team.

uli · 2014-08-01 12:42:52

I stopped counting.

colak · 2014-08-01 13:14:09

I’d like to know what steps one should take against content scrapers. This tread will hopefully be of an educational value to a lot of us.

Bloke · 2014-08-01 13:32:33

colak wrote #282588:

I’d like to know what steps one should take against content scrapers.

Smashing mag says.

Towards the end of that article is a link to some technical steps, chiefly using .htaccess to block scrapers. Presumably the list of scrapers has changed somewhat since 2008, and this is hardly an effective method to use as you’ll always be one step behind.

Thank you Mr Apricot for bringing this up. Not sure what, if anything, we can do about it. A cease and desist letter to someone who is cloning a site in real-time for nefarious purposes isn’t going to be met with open arms and compliance so such sites might need to be approached from the top (ISP) down under their potential-to-harm-the-server-or-its-reputation clause.

If the aim is to spread malware, surely anyone Googling for us will find such sites blocked under the anti-malware front-screen. So those sites would need to be reached from somewhere other than a Google search. Fair enough.

For the other, benign clones, there may well be legitimate reasons for doing so (even though it would be nice to be asked first). For example, our domain might be blocked under a dictatorial regime somewhere in the world and some benevolent white knight from inside the affected area could be cloning our content so the information can be disseminated. Long shot, maybe, but a possibility.

Mr Apricot · 2014-08-01 13:47:15

Found out that they are mirroring your site and not actually scraping. With our site, we found that there was a specific range of IP addresses from China and we essentially just shut those down and it stopped. So if you can, find the IP’s and block them off.

springworks · 2014-08-01 13:52:47

Mirroring the site and injecting flash ads at the foot of the page…

Bloke · 2014-08-01 13:53:14

Mr Apricot wrote #282590:

Found out that they are mirroring your site and not actually scraping

Yeah, I just spotted that. I deliberately made an edit to my above post and it was reflected in the clone immediately. Thought maybe they were hijacking the same DNS info and the two domains would resolve to identical IPs, but they don’t.

I don’t see the Flash ad content (just empty boxes where they would be). Still can’t quite fathom the business model of how they would attract people to a bogus forum (aside from getting us to talk about it!) just to show ads. Unless they’re used as a mask to trick people into logging in on the bogus site, entering their credentials there, which will give an attack vector into our real site.

Baffling.

colak · 2014-08-01 14:14:13

I thought that mirroring a db would need special privileges. wouldn’t it?

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#1 2014-08-01 11:52:29