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Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

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301–310 of 310 posts

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abuse contacts never work. I've never had any success hounding them about malicious sites they host.

actually works very well when it's combined with DMCA takedown request.

Ah yes... Those stories we read where even a hint of a DCMA request results in a takedown, so that the host avoids the legal risk. That could be extremely effective in this case?!

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#302
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone not have their referer header supressed or faked?

I strip the referrer generally via https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer , unfortunately it breaks a small number of sites very badly, such as web.archive.org and a few others. some of them claiming it was done to combat scraping.

Breaking is only part of the problem. The pages that rely on the referer header take it for granted and do not implement any meaningful error handling. They just die a horrible death, instead of responding with an error message stating that they need a referer.

One bad example is relying on the referer only for log-out, everything else works. That site also runs massive js on log-out, as if it really needs to rely on explicit log-out, and not just the user disappearing.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they bother doing this domain proxy stuff in the first place?

High quality content with a good standing in Google => unique and quality impressions => more revenue from the ads they insert in the content.

There is also the potential to use it as a watering hole for more sophisticated or subversive measures where they subtly change what you post to promote something you don't actually promote (so at some point they deviate from pure proxy to mitm).

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#306
post #142
post #71

Same thing happened to me and my service ( https://next-episode.net ) almost 2 years ago. I wrote a HN post about it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105890 , but to spare you all the irrelevant details and digging in the comments for updates - here is what worked for me - you can block all their IPs, even though they may have A LOT and can change them on each call: 1) I prepared a fake URL that no leg…

Might I suggest a spin on this: instead of blocking the IPs, consider serving up different content to those IPs. You could make a page that shames their domain name for stealing content. You could make a redirect page that redirects people to your website. Or you could make a page with absolutely disgusting content. I think it would discourage them from playing the cat and mouse game with you and fixing it by getting…

If those IPs are VPN services, you might be negatively affecting all VPN users in addition to the proxy.

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#307
post #102

What about a slightly alternative approach, where instead of trying to block the abuser, you try to make it clear to end users what the real website is? E.g. in your logo image, include the real domain name "saashub.com". Have some introduction text on your home page "Here at saashub.com, we compare SaaS products ...." When your images are hotlinked, replace them with text like "This is a fraudulent website, find us…

Not sure if this would help since: > 4) Use absolute URLs everywhere - they are rewriting everything www.saashub.com to their domain name.

Try some things like sa(zero-width-space)sshub.com

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#308
post #71

Same thing happened to me and my service ( https://next-episode.net ) almost 2 years ago. I wrote a HN post about it as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26105890 , but to spare you all the irrelevant details and digging in the comments for updates - here is what worked for me - you can block all their IPs, even though they may have A LOT and can change them on each call: 1) I prepared a fake URL that no leg…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#309
post #259

This made me wonder whether something similar was happening to my domain? How would one go about finding out?

Maybe as simple as a Google / Bing (Yandex / Baidu?) search using some text likely to be unique to your site ("enclose the text in quotes" like that).

If your site had been copied but wasn't indexed by the big search engines, that would presumably limit the options to make money from it?

Re: Ask HN: Someone is proxy-mirroring my website, can I do anything?

#310
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making js essential is not that hard, right? Just "display: none" on the root element, which is removed by js :) More sophisticated options can been found in other comments.

Forcing all users of your website to use JavaScript to get around a scammer is pretty heavy-handed.

most websites these days already use javascript, and all modern browsers already support it. unless you're some really niche turbonerd website, nobody is going to notice or care...
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