Bitacle update (you know, the blog thieves)

Don’t know what bitacle is? If you have a blog you should find out. Check out my first post. I’ll wait…

OK, so the .htaccess stuff that people suggested never worked for me. They still got through, and I had to go to 100 character truncated feeds. That solved the problem of them stealing future posts, but they will always have the posts they stole previously — including hotlinking to my images. And even though they do some fancy dancing to make it look like they’re hosting the images on their site, I can see in my access logs that they are not. And this bandwidth-leeching was pissing me off.

I googled around and found the cool folks at Altlab.com. They have a great anti-hotlinking tutorial. I played around with it and came up with the following.

# hotlinking

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?bitacle\.org/ [NC]

RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/suckitbitacle.jpe [L]

This worked great for about a day until bitacle got ‘smart’ and wrote a cute javascript to obscure the referring domain. So I grabbed the IP from my access logs, and changed to this:

# hotlinking

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^213\.201\.119\.162$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^213\.201\.119\.163$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^212\.22\.59\.251$ [NC,OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?bitacle\.org/ [NC]

RewriteRule .*\.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/suckitbitacle.jpe [L]

As of today, this works and has the added benefit of displaying the below image on my bitacle entries that have images in them:

suckitbitacle.jpe

Like I said, works fine now, but we’ll see what the cockroaches come up with next. I see some people saying that they think bitacle is ‘responding’ to people’s concerns, but in fact all they’re really doing is reacting to the ways they’re being blocked. I’m unhappy that I’ve had to go to short feeds, but the truth is that I’ll likely leave them that way even after bitacle is long-gone. I don’t want to be wasting my time like this again in a few months when some other splog decides to do the same thing.

Any other mom bloggers out there have questions about how to protect your content? Or help understanding the controversy? I’d be happy to try to help. Stick your question in the comments and we can share techniques with the rest of the class. (And I promise to get back to blogging about poop, cute things my kids say, and whatever else moms are supposed to blog about real soon now.) Later!


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10 responses to “Bitacle update (you know, the blog thieves)”

  1. Jonathan Bailey Avatar

    There is no doubt that Bitacle has now turned completely to the “dark side” if you will. They are obscuring their Google information, working around blocks, disrespecting robots.txt files and generally ducking responsibility.

    I’ve posted some ways to shut them down on my site, but those focus on cutting off their funding and their search engine benefits. I’ll have to add these blocking filters as well if that is alright with you.

    Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help!

  2. Plain Jane Mom Avatar

    Jonathan: I just checked and my .htaccess stuff is still keeping my images off their site, so go ahead and add it to your list if you like. Of course, as soon as they grab another IP or IP range we’ll all have to change our filters. But at least it is something!

  3. Nancy Avatar

    It’s great that you’re offering to help people with this. we definitely need to thwart Bitacle!

    I haven’t yet set up the .htaccess on my blog — I will definitely do that. for now I’m starting with truncated feeds. Hopefully that will help!

  4. Plain Jane Mom Avatar

    Hi Nancy. Bitacle is a real pain, but unfortunately even if they get stopped someone else will just pop up behind them. Isn’t it fun! Let me know if there’s anything I can help you with. I still have access to an old typepad account so I vaguely remember how it works over there ;)

  5. […] Tee hee — turns out that bitacle puts your feed image up in their header area. Now you can click directly from my bitacle posts to the Stop Bitacle site — Ha! OK I’m easily amused, but that combined with my tip for redirecting their image requests to show the below really makes me laugh. […]

  6. Twisted Cinderella Avatar

    Thanks for helping us out with this. And I like your idea of making the link to the stop Bitacle site. too funny!

  7. Jeanie Avatar

    OMG! They have pics of my kids. This is freaking me out. I know nothing about this coding stuff. Is anyone willing to walk me through what I need to do to get the coding in my template so that it displays like Plain Jane Mom’s? Thanks.

  8. Plain Jane Mom Avatar

    Twisted Cinderella — Kind of cracked me up too.

    Jeanie — I’m sorry to hear that! My little trick only works if you have access to edit what is called your ‘.htaccess file’ — does anyone out there know if Blogger lets you do that?

  9. Karin Avatar

    No, us with Blogger are unable to access the .htaccess file. I have yet to find any solutions….I don’t think there are any, and I think I may be needing to host my blog elsewhere.

  10. Plain Jane Mom Avatar

    Karin — If you do decide to switch I recommend WordPress.com. It is free, plus the folks in charge are committed to helping their users stay out of places like bitacle. Good Luck!

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