Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Just a guy named Yuri

This morning I woke up to the following comment on one of my recipes:


IP Address: 193.239.152.85
Name: Food for Heaven. Cooking recipes
Email Address: sally@foodforheaven.com
URL: http://www.foodforheaven.com
Comments:

I've made this soupe today and was really impressed. It was perfect!
Thanks for your tasty recipe!

Cooking is also my hobby, so we are kind of tasty-friends :)


I almost always check the URLs of comments before they post, and sure enough, this one turned out to be an aggregator, using content from my site and Kalyn's.

The nerve! First throwing up a Wordpress site with our feeds, and then leaving comments on my site to promote it?

When I demanded that Sally take down my content, I got this from "Sally Moore":


Hello, Elise.

I thought it would be great for you to have your recipes on my website. I added link to your website after every recipe, so people could read the whole entry at elise.com
But if you don't want to promote your website this way, it's your choice. Food for Heaven is becoming a great portal.

I won't post your materials anymore. I thought you're kind of woman who prefer friendship and collaboration. I was wrong.



Yeah, right. Turns out in the long header of the email, it was actually sent by a guy named "Yuri Zakharov", confirmed when I got another email from Yuri himself with the same IP address.

So, just a warning to everyone, the sneaky aggregators are trying to promote their stolen goods on our own sites, leaving happy, friendly comments from people with happy, friendly names.

If you've received any comments recently from FoodForHeaven, you should know that it's just a guy named Yuri who thinks we are stupid enough to buy into it.


This Post was written by Elise from Simply Recipes

5 comments:

Dawn0fTime said...

Thanks for the heads up, Elise. I saw your hard-boiled eggs how-to on that site as well.

I always get one from a "guy" named k.daniel or daniel.k or something like that. He says things like "I didn't understand some parts of {insert article name here} but I guess I'll have to do some research because it sounds interesting!" Isn't that sweet?

Trig said...

I had a similar email, Elise. I threatened legal action and the link soon disappeared.

Elise said...

Yep, now he's one of those never-give-up types. Now he's going after Dani Spies.

Kalyn Denny said...

I am so sick of these people! Thanks for the heads up Elise. When I e-mailed and asked them to remove my stuff or else I would report them to Google and Wordpress, the only reply I got back was "Enjoy :)" but they did remove the stuff.

Anonymous said...

These astroturf blogs are really annoying and it seems like swatting down one only results in 10 more. I've had a few pilfering my content as well (and once a person just wholesale copy/pasting my content onto their own blog, while still using the photos from my server!)...

My first response was to only do partial RSS feeds rather than full post, but I've been looking into any plugins I can install with my blog to make automated republishing like this less successful, but I haven't gotten very far just yet (surely there must be a way...). It seems like there's too many of them to fight against