This "tubeless" site is using the Elliot Back plugin to scrape people's blog feeds and it's really annoying.  Anyone know a good way to stop this?

God, this has been annoying me too. I think I'm just going to try blocking the IP address at .htaccess level and see what happens...

Search for their IP adress and add something like this to your .htaccess file to block them:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^XX\.XX\.XX\.XX
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]

You could also redirect them to a special feed you set up (e.g. saying that they stole your content):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^XX.XX.XX.XX
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://newfeedurl.com/feed

 

Or you could redirect them to their own feed. 

Additionally, you should contact the hoster and send them a cease and desist letter.

You can also try to send Google a DMCA. 

It happened to my last post, but Akismet marked it as spam so I didn't see it at all -- consider installing it on your blog or something. It works wonders for spam, and lolikit's comments. Especially the latter.

"and lolikit's comments."

It depends on how serious the scaper is.  Certain programs will strip out all code from feeds, which makes it difficult to use various plugins to stop the scrapers.  Other scrapers will actually download the posts and images from your site, bypassing hotlinking protection.

As for .htaccess banning IPs, I'm not personally a huge fan of IP banning as a long-term solution.  It's pretty trivial to change IPs, and then you often just end up blocking someone who is a legitimate user.

I'm sure some people hate this, but on our website, I only allow excerpts in the RSS feed.  Some other tips include contacting google (if they use adsense) and reporting the scraping, or perhaps routing your feeds through feedburner.  There are also a number of wordpress plugins that will append text or a "digital fingerprint" to your RSS feeds.  This may help to hijack the scraper or at least tell who is scraping your RSS.  However, I am not completely convinced that these plugins will stop the problem.

BTW, Hung posted a funny trick you play on scrapers, at least for a little bit. 

I think there's some kind of plugin where you can block people easier than by using an htaccess. I'll have to see if it's still around, and if it actually works.

Edit: Found it. Does anyone want to be the guinea pig who verifies if it works or not? ;) 

I will, I'm one of the sites Tubeless is scrapping.

Although, I need to figure out how to work the plugin first.

Tubeless: whois | more info

The plugin doesn't seem to work. So far my posts are being displayed by Tubeless the saem as before. I've set it to two IPs tolook for, as the one Kabitzin mentioned is different then the one I found using the site/tool mentioned in Hung's trick.

Alternatively, with the plugin you can set it to look for different user agents and not IPs, but I don't really know what the is as tehre is no readme that came with the plugin, and I had to figure a lot of stuff by trial and error. 

I've also been scrapped by tubeless. Have tried the AntiLeech plugin, but like Xebek, no joy. Apparently if the feed is being grabbed via Feedburner, AntiLeech doesn't work. (Link) Now I'm half considering whether or not to delete my Feedburner feed!

In any case, the Google Ads seemed to have vanished from tubeless.

Hmm. It looks like they're scraping via a secondary RSS feed. So a local change wouldn't stop them. I dunno which feed they're using though. It's weird because the thing says "Original post by AnimeNation News" instead of, say, Basugasubakuhatsu Anime Blog.

Plus they don't have ads, so I don't see what their point is. I guess at some point I disabled trackbacks, so they don't get through to me, which is why I didn't really care about Tubeless. It's still sorta annoying, but they're not really harming me in any way... 

I always wondered why you disabled trackbacks. I even think you're the only one who has disabled them.

Isn't there a plugin that blacklists trackbacks from certain sites?

Yeah, too much trackback spam.

Um, I dunno if there's a plugin for that. Akismet blocks the obvious ones, but not the not obvious ones.