And even better, they’re making money by taking our content and then putting Google ads on it. Check this out to see what I mean:
http://en.bitacle.org/blogs/viewblog/xgeipfww0/33?usrmode=1
That’s my post from yesterday. Does it say ‘Plain Jane Mom’ anywhere? Nope. Creepy, right? Here are more:
And there are plenty more, but I’m tired of using their shit site to find them. Since they just subscribe to your RSS feed and use that to build their site, the “fix” is to change your RSS feeds to summaries only, not full posts.
Legitimate aggregators like Technorati display only excerpts of your content, and I have no problem with that. Does bitacle irritate anyone else, or is it just me? Is this just a necessary evil? They’re selling Adsense ads on our content. Is everyone already aware of this and thinks it’s OK? I’m amazed at their gall myself, but I need to hear what y’all think.



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U got the same problem of my blog. Simply Bitacle.
I resolved it with a .htaccess rule:
# STOP BITACLE!
RewriteEngine On
deny from 212.22.59.251
deny from bitacle.org
Yup, block them, keep your RSS feeds as you want them. In addition to the IP above, they used 72.78.117.236 to access my site yesterday.
oooh…I haven’t used bitacle…only technorati. How frustrating is that, though? Hope that can be resolved fast…
Psst…I’ve also tagged you…
~Peg
Thank you Niccolò and valerie! I’ll see if that works on my next post.
I wrote a WordPress plugin that can block sploggers like Bitacle that I’ve released on my blog. It’s not as comprehensive as good .htaccess settings, but it’s a bit easier to configure and lets you fight back a bit.
Wow. I had never even heard of this! Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Here you a better .htaccess configuration
This new rule wont stupidly block it, it will simply redirect him to a 403 error. MUHAHAH! :D
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^212\.22\.59\.251$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^72\.78\.117\.236$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Bitacle
RewriteRule .? - [F]
and also, just to be sure, you can add these rules to your robots.txt
User-agent: Bitacle bot/1.1
Disallow: /
User-agent: Bitacle bot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Bitacle
Disallow: /
In italian is “Un harvester buono è un harvester morto” (“A good harvester is a died harvester”) :)
Bye bye!
Thanks Niccolò! I think the 72.78.117.236 IP has turned out to be be Owen’s but other than that, this looks great. Thanks!
I have the same thing happening! Arggghhh. Thank you!
I think, every one need to join in and report Bitacle.org, as a spam to Google.com at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html