Hi everyone,
This is just a quick announcement to let you all know that I’ve just installed a plugin on the site, to prevent theft of my content.
The trigger for this, is that over the last couple of days, 3 of my posts have been stolen and republished on another website which clearly just steals from other sites, because I saw a Dramabeans recap also posted there.
I am having trouble locating the host of this thieving website, and so, I can’t serve a DMCA notice. I’m not TOO upset about that, because with the plugin that I’ve just installed, they can’t steal any more of my posts, and neither can anyone else.
Unfortunately, this also means that you guys won’t be able to right-click, highlight, copy or paste on the blog, sorry about that. 🙁
I’ve been trying to avoid implementing this solution for a long time, because I know it’s inconvenient for you guys, since sometimes you do want to download a picture or screenshot, or sometimes you want to copy and paste a portion of a paragraph, into your comment.
I’m cool with those kinds of copy and paste things. It’s just other sites stealing my posts and republishing it as original that really annoys me, and creates problems for me. 😕
I’ve shared before, that it’s a hassle to chase after these thieves and serve DMCA notices, which is something I’ve had to do from time to time (typically every few months).
Lately, though, with the way things have been going, I’ve basically had it up to here, with people stealing my content, so I’ve caved, and today I’ve installed the plugin.
I’m sorry for the inconvenience, everyone, I hope you don’t mind too much.
KFG ❤️
PS: I’ve formatted all hyperlinks on the blog to open in new windows (thankfully, a practice I’ve kept from the start 😅), so even though you can’t right-click on them now, just clicking on them won’t cause you to leave the page you were on. It’ll just open the link in a new window. I hope that helps!
UPDATE!
Hi everyone, just a quick update to let you know that the free plugin didn’t stop the thieving website from stealing my announcement post (of all things 🙄), so I’ve now upgraded to the paid Pro version, which offers more layers of protection.
The silver lining, to having to go with the Pro version, is that I now have the flexibility to allow right-clicks on the site. So I’m blocking highlighting of text, but I’m allowing right-clicks on images and links, so that the site’s more user friendly.
Aside from these, there’s supposed to be lots more stuff going on in the background to prevent content theft, so here’s hoping that this will stop the content scraping bot that’s targeting my site. 🤞🏻
KFG ❤️
Sorry to hear about people stealing your content. Whatever helps, it’s your hard work! Him neh 💪
That’s terrible, but blocking right click will do nothing to such people. It is easily circumvented. Instead all it does it make it more difficult for your normal readers. Please reconsider.
Oh no, really?? What do you suggest then, Dannii? You sound like you know about this kind of stuff?
Hi Dannii, I thought about your feedback and have now upgraded to the paid Pro version of the plugin, which offers more layers of protection, and which also gives me the flexibility to allow right-clicks on images and links. I’m still blocking highlighting of text, but I hope this compromise will make the user experience acceptably comfortable.
The other layers of protection are supposed to help more than what I had in place at first, so fingers crossed that this actually works! 🤞🏻😅
Unfortunately, there really isn’t any way to truly block people’s ability to copy content. (Even if you were to go to the total-overkill extreme of encrypting the source code or posting images instead of text, someone who actually wanted to could just OCR the page.)
Right now, if I type ctrl+U while viewing this page I get the page source, meaning all of the code *and text* that the browser uses to display the page. The text is broken up by HTML tags, but it’s easy to strip those out automatically. In fact, browsers that have a reader view mode do exactly that in order to display a clean view of the page (and I just successfully tried copy/pasting the text from this page in reader view). Again, you could technically find convoluted ways around that to make life harder for plagiarizers, but you’d also end up making the site inaccessible to people who use screen readers, reader view, and other special modes of reading the site.
The protection plugin might still work in that given that these guys also copied this post, it sounds like they’re just using an automated script without really paying attention. So hopefully their script will need updating to continue to work and maybe they won’t notice or bother for a while, or ever. But you might want to keep monitoring, because if they do feel like putting in a small amount of effort they can easily keep plagiarizing, and it’d be a shame to pay for protection that doesn’t do much. Tracking down their host might ultimately be a better bet.
Also, it might not do any good, but I think you may be able to report the site to Google and any other platforms they’re showing up on for plagiarism, even if you don’t know who the host is. Are they actually showing up in places (search engines, social media) that would let them drive traffic away from you, or are they just putting stuff up on a site that few people are going to come across?
And rightly so. I would be shaking in anger if people took credit for my work at my jon which I am not emotionally connected to, unlike the deep, thoughtful, labours of love like the content you put up here. You’ve been way too kind and I’m glad you’re protecting your hard and heart work!
Ahh thank you so much, MC!! Yes, it has been annoying and frustrating for sure, and now that the plugin is working to protect the site, I do feel much better. Like, I don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Again, though, sorry to everyone for the inconvenience that this causes you! 🙏🏻 And also, thank you so much for being so gracious with your support and understanding! ❤️
Well done, KFG!
Aw, thanks for the support, @seankfletcher! 🥲
My absolute pleasure, KFG 😊