Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Design and Content : Finding rips

[EmuHost-Pete]

seeing all these thread about who ripped who, how do you actually find these sites?

[the_pm]

Copyscape is helpful.

Sometimes rippers will hotlink, and that's easy to spot through logs.

Searching for your files by file name will expose some.

Sometimes just searching for content strings will do the trick (though this is pretty much what copyscape does).

There are probably other ways, but those are the big ones.

[quantumphysics]

My layouts all have some amusing tags in both CSS and JS and HTML that are very out of sight.

Like possibly one line of strangely unnecessary code that does nothing.

[whmanaged]

Yeah, back when I was designing for PHP-Nuke (cms) I noticed there were so many people ripping designs.

[EmuHost-Pete]

thanks folks.

[bear]

Originally Posted by quantumphysics

Like possibly one line of strangely unnecessary code that does nothing.

Me too, though unintentional.

[whmanaged]

Originally Posted by bear

Me too, though unintentional.

Do you code when your drunk, cause when I code some times I'm a lil drunk and put some stuff in there that shouldn't be so when it doesn't work right i blame it on my drinking!

[bear]

No one to blame but me, I don't drink alcohol.

Back on topic though.
Now and again I'd Google some text, the poor man's Copyscape. That and combing logs for image calls, and the occasional live chat that gets opened from the ripping site. We once talked someone out of continuing to be hosted with the one that copied, when they thought they'd reached their support. Rare, and priceless.

[madchas]

Originally Posted by bear

We once talked someone out of continuing to be hosted with the one that copied, when they thought they'd reached their support. Rare, and priceless.

LOL, now that is priceless.

If hot linking images is a problem, why not disallow hot linking?

If I'm not mistaken, there is also a way to show an image of your choice to the hot link sites.

I've seen some nasty and sometimes graphic images used for this purpose.

[vespid]

Originally Posted by madchas

LOL, now that is priceless.

If hot linking images is a problem, why not disallow hot linking?

If I'm not mistaken, there is also a way to show an image of your choice to the hot link sites.

I've seen some nasty and sometimes graphic images used for this purpose.

Agreed. You can replace images if they're hotlinked, I need to get round to that one day.

Like it's already been said though, you can take a section of your text and run it through Google to find any coppiers.. Hell! You could even put your copyright text in your websites footer into Google and find people who have stolen your site. It sounds dumb but you would be surprised at the amount of people who don't bother changing the copyright notice!

[bear]

Originally Posted by madchas

If I'm not mistaken, there is also a way to show an image of your choice to the hot link sites.I've seen some nasty and sometimes graphic images used for this purpose.

Instead of switching to a nasty graphic, when found maybe change it/them to something that states "Image stolen from yourcompany.com, an honest provider. Tell us where you saw this for 10% off!".

Have fun with it.

[vespid]

Originally Posted by bear

Instead of switching to a nasty graphic, when found maybe change it/them to something that states "Image stolen from yourcompany.com, an honest provider. Tell us where you saw this for 10% off!".

Have fun with it.

Brilliant idea! I'll be using this

[madchas]

Originally Posted by bear

Instead of switching to a nasty graphic, when found maybe change it/them to something that states "Image stolen from yourcompany.com, an honest provider. Tell us where you saw this for 10% off!".

Have fun with it.

Now that's brilliant, just one more way to increase your customer base.

[zomex]

The best way to reduce this is target the people/sites that are offering the particular design. For this I recommend Google search and alerts.

I'd also recommend doing things that will potentially put people off ripping your site such as compressing HTML/CSS/javascript on your live version. It won't stop everyone but it will reduce it.

When I say compress I mean compress CSS to 1 line for example with a very scary warning underneath

Here's some tools:

HTML - http://www.digitalcoding.com/tools/compress-html.html
CSS - http://www.cssdrive.com/index.php/main/csscompressor
Javascript - http://jscompress.com/

^ It's not bullet proof but it will confuse a lot of people and speed up your site in the process.

Also you could use the complete URL for the biggest image on your site, every couple of months change the location on your site and replace the old one with a notice that the current site is using a stolen design.

Jack

[quantumphysics]

....which is exactly one click away from "decompression"

and completelyuseless