For the last few months, one of my blogs has been the target of a splog attack, or whatever you want to call it when an idiot steals every blog post you make. Of course, his splog (combination of spam and blog) has no contact information and if you look it up in the whois, the contact info is anonymous.
Today I came up with an idea to hopefully make this idiot scrape someone else’s RSS feed instead of mine. Basically, I make a degrading post that will make his splog look really ridiculous. An example is above. The splog in question is using a WordPress plugin called Auto-Blogster that checks RSS feeds of other blogs every so often with cron and automatically posts those posts to his blog.
I don’t want to keep the crazy post on my blog very long, so what I do is post the degrading article on my blog and click on the script located in the plugin folders on the splog site. If you have the same problem, look on their site… it should be somewhere like: theirsplog.com/wp-content/plugins/auto-blogster
Look for a script in that folder called: ajax_auto_blogster.php and click it.
This should then post the embarrassing post to their splog - and now you can delete it from your real blog. Good times, eh? I don’t expect splogs to go away any time soon. Email spam is still around. Comment spam is here to stay. There will probably be more and more splog problems like this - so be sure to bookmark this article in case it happens to you! If anyone out there knows a better way to combat splogs (with WordPress), please leave a comment! 
UPDATE! Check out this article… this technique seems to work.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Ha, that’s pretty good.
Adwhores .com has been stealing all my content lately, although if I tried this trick, I don’t think anyone would really end up reading the post on their blog (because their splog sucks and no one reads it…)
Congrats on the success! The idea of cloaking to stop scraping has been around for a while, I covered it on my site a while back, but it is difficult to pull off.
Fortunately, there are plugins such as Copyfeed that can do most of the heavy lifting, it even embeds the IP address into the scraped post making it easier to blacklist.
Fun stuff.
Congrats and I’m going to have to look deeper into this ajax auto blogster program. However, in my experience, it isn’t the most common splog method out there.
My friends, there are more sinister applications afoot.
Are a lot of sploggers really making it through Bad Behavior? I blog in Esperanto myself, so if mine is scraped, it’ll doubtlessly look like gibberish (or Spanish or Italian) to readers. Of course, it costs sploggers nothing to do, despite they’re very unlikely to get a big rank, since the useful blog entries will be linked to on their original site, not on a seedy splog site.
What was the site that was publishing your content?
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