I’m going off-topic tonight to share a bit of information I read yesterday. Some of you may be aware of harvesting sites, websites who copy posts from other bloggers without their permission and publish them. It’s been brought to my attention that a site called Tygpress.com has been collecting the posts of many WordPress bloggers including ours. I’m always happy to share information with others but this is different. When you go to this site the home page is just a list of hashtags. There is a search box and nothing else, nothing about the site owner, no contact details, no explanation of what the site is about. When I typed in our URL I saw loads of posts from both our blogs there. Apparently, there is very little you can do about these people. There is a site where you can post a complaint about a breach of copyright but no guarantee they will do anything about it. WordPress apparently can’t do much about it either.  If you don’t write for a living maybe it won’t bother you having your work hijacked. This is a hobby blog and while I’m not going to lose any sleep over it I did complain because of the principle of the thing.

Some things other bloggers are doing to protect their work are:

• Deleting posts, apparently, if you delete a post it will disappear from Tygpress but I won’t be doing that.
• Language, one blogger suggested that as the site appears to be family-friendly dropping a few four-letter words into a post might deter them. I won’t be doing that either.
• Removing the reblog button from your site. People could still reblog your work but it would be harder.
• Displaying a badge like the one included here. I will do this for a while but I don’t know how long I’ll keep it up. Even if this site disappears there will be others.

None of these things guarantees that your work won’t be hijacked but at least you’d be doing something, or you can just accept that’s how the internet is. I’ve included links to a couple of articles about this subject that I read yesterday in case you haven’t seen them.

Here is a link to a fellow blogger, Fandango who explains more about it and has created a badge you can put on your posts if you wish.

Tygpress.com

Feel Free to Use this Badge