Is There A Way To Block My Feed?
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I just had a friend have several posts from her blog stolen and posted on an unauthorized website. I don’t know if this is what’s called harvesting? Well, her husband found the contact information for the person who purchased the domain (via godaddy.com) and runs the site and emailed him demanding that his wife’s content (including pictures) be removed. His reply was this:
we have uses all feeds from your site…if you do not want to share the content do not provide a feed
Unfortunately, my blog was linked in one of those posts and now I’m concerned this same person might try to do the same to me. My blog cannot be searched via any search engine but it’s not private either. How can I protect myself from something like this happening and what legal reproach do I have, if any, should it happen to me? I’m very concerned that I should take my blog down altogether to protect myself from something like this. I’m not a techie, so please respond with that in mind! Thanks.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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we have uses all feeds from your site…if you do not want to share the content do not provide a feed
This is simply BS. Your friend’s husband can submit a DMCA compliant to the hosting provider of the person harvesting her content which may even have such website shutdown. There are other forum volunteers who have better knowledge on this and they could give you a better advice than I could.
Regarding your feeds, I don’t think there’s a way to block them, however, you could set them to show only a summary of your posts. To do this go to Settings > Reading and then where it says: “For each article in a feed, show ” click the “Summary” radio button.
HTH
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Raincoaster wrote something that may help you:
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Here’s the article raincoaster is linking to; you can forward it to your friend or her husband so they know what they should do:
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Thanks devblog. I have opted for the post summary before, but was getting complaints from some readers because it directed them to my site. I know a lot of people prefer to read in a reader, but if this gives me more protection as far as my feed goes, I may opt-in again. I’ll check out the links.
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I’m sorry, I don’t know if I completely understand what I should recommend my friend do. She said her husband filed a complaint with Go Daddy regarding the website that was harvesting her content. Is there a larger governing body that a complaint should be filed with?
http://stolen.wordpress.com/ was a little confusing for me.
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@jrsypoet1776, there are several things you can do to make this more difficult for them to steal your stuff – or limit what they can steal, but sadly there isn’t anyway to really stop them other than doing what has been suggested and contacting their web hosts. I’ve had great success with contacting web hosts about stolen content. In most cases the web host has simply shut the site down. It may end up popping up again on another host, but they will think seriously about stealing your content a second time.
I know you may get complaints, but set your feed to show summaries only and also to set your feed to show only the latest 3 posts maximum (settings > reading). Perhaps make a post and explain why you are doing this and if anyone emails you, explain to them also.
The only way to completely block your RSS feed is to set your blog to private, which means that you would have to specifically invited people before they could view your blog, and they would have to sign up for an account here at wordpress.COM, and that is a lot to go through. Also, you can only invite 35 people before having to buy the unlimited users upgrade.
The sad fact is, if you post something on the web, someone is going to steal it. There are just too many out there that do not realize it is stealing, or simply don’t care. All you can do is be vigilant and check for stolen stuff on the web regularly. If you find something, do the research and find out who they are hosted with and file a DMCA violation notice. Web hosts are required by law to investigate each complaint, and if it is valid, they must at the bare minimum delete the content from the user’s site.
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I forgot to mention that removing the feed links from a blog is not going to stop scrapers since they can easily figure out the feed addresses. The only thing it would do is frustrate regular visitors since they would typically not know how to figure out your feed address.
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