Russian site mirroring my forum!

[mr_wobble]

Hi All,

I run a busy expat forum and some russian hosted site has illegaly mirrored my site almost in its entirety

I have contacted Google and the owner of the russian website requesting it be taken down, but apart from that, what are my options? Do I have any? I get the feeling there is little I can do.

Can anyone offer me any advice/next steps/course of action?

Thanks :)

[jdMorgan]

Are they mirroring it (copying it periodically) or are they proxying it (making connections to your server to fetch your content in real-time to serve to their visitors requesting URLs on their domain )?

Either way, you can take steps in the server configuration to limit access when the referrer is the other site, or when the requestor is the other site. How you do that depends on what kind of exploit they're perpetrating, what kind of server your forum, is hosted on, and what level of privileges you have to configure your server.

Jim

[monkeythumpa]

Are they making money off your content? Contact their ad network and stop their ads.

[mr_wobble]

Hi Guys,

Its a phpBB forum. I am thinking they have used a grabber (wget?) with a custom user agent string since I all well known grabbers are blocked by my .htaccess file.

And its being mirrored periodically as far as I can see, and I have identified from my logs the IP range where it might have originated from as there have been a couple of spikes in bandwidth consumption in the past 2 months.

I have created a spam report to google since a site operator search returns over 3,000 pages and also adsense, since like you say, if the economic driver is removed, then so is the motivation.

Hopefully this will sort itself out.

Thanks.

[adamnichols45]

How did this end mr_wobble?

[supercars]

there are large international lawfirms based in the US with Moscow offices. the rule of law is not always respected or enforced in Russia and people sometimes get hurt trying to enforce it. Is it worth $50k to you?