Folks who copy your stuff piss me off!
It's one thing to be inspired by or learn from pages you see on someone else's site. It's another thing entirely to rip off someone else's work. Too many folks in the industry, through laziness, ignorance or just poor home-training don't think twice about grabbing the code from a site they like and throwing it up on their own domain. For those that may be reading this that didn't learn not to steal when they were growing up or say they don't know better, let me clue you in ... That shit is wrong!
Some webmasters spend a lot of time tweaking their code to get their layout just right for their target audience. They do and re-do pages, judge the effectiveness of their changes and then redo it again.
They get their meta-tags working with their text and strike a balance between load time and search engine indexing. Just about the time things start to click, some lame-ass comes along and snatches the whole kit-n-caboodle and throws it up on their mytrash.com domain.
You generally never know they're out their 'till a friend runs across them or 'till you go to check your SE placement and find your pages, on someone else's site is above you. Or if it's one of the dumb ones, they forget to change a sponsor link or something. When you first find out, if you're like me, you're pissed.
A hundred cruel thoughts may shoot through your head, what can you really do? While once in a great while you can write their host or sponsors and get some support, oft as not you're left to grumble while the nameless thief moves on to copy someone else's stuff. With the web being what it is, folks will tell you there's nothing that can be done. I don't agree .. at least not entirely.
See, I think that while the adult web is a huge sprawling thing, when we as an industry decide something is not to be tolerated, it gets curtailed. Yeah it's a big web but I'll bet any stolen site you run across will be using the services from names you know. They use the same sponsors we do, the same counters, the same host and often times, the same links sites.
I'd say the same content but if they'll steal code, odds are they're stealing content too. No-one expects sponsors or host to police their users for this kind of stuff, but we'd hope those key players would be sensitive and responsive when they're alerted to these situations by honest, hard-working webmasters.
Those that are not, well, maybe we should consider if they're services we want to use. As I said before, what sponsors you use, who you exchange traffic with and how, all these things cast your vote on how you think things should work.
When you support those that support thieves, to some extent, you're guilty by association. I say encourage those you do business with to dump these code stealers.
Cast some light on the coach-roaches that scurry about the fringe of our industry taking advantage where they can. Like the roaches they are, you'll probably never get rid of them, but left unchecked . . . well, we all know what happens when you don't stay on top of a roach problem, right?
Ok, enough for this week. More rants in the weeks to come.
'till next time ...
be well
- Khan
