I am a newbie translator, and it hurts that after many hours worth of work is negated because a website automatically copies off my output. I dont even put up ads. What systems do you use in combating these bots? or should I pull out from novelupdates instead?
Yea. You are getting them free advertisiment. People who use NU don't use those aggregators most of the time. You can try to get their reading base here instead by dropping links to NU or whatever, so unaware readers of that site will become aware of an arguably better service
Edited. I'm just so frustrated now. Now I'm planning to move to carrd + google docs like what I see in twitter, esp since it's still quite early. I've also gathered 2 or 3 new projects but good thing I noticed this now. Now I understand why a there's a lot of translators doing the same.
Don't forget about apps, there is one app in specific that even has chapters of webnovel novels with paywall, even originals
There is no defense. They use NU's listing as a source for finding new materials. Ai-chan only posted 2 chapters of Talking To Djinns and it was already copied by aggregators. That's why Ai-chan stopped translating. Like hell Ai-chan would continuing giving them free stuff to make money of.
To be honest I only use aggregators when the original translators site is down. Also, this stuff happens my guy and I think it sucks. If trash man doesn't like it then no should like them.
You can prevent shitty readers from copy and pasting content by using anti-copy plugins but ya can't stop them bots from stealing. Instead, what you could do is to post dummy chapters first before changing the content two days later or adding dummy chapters linked to the actual chapters. I just learn to ignore aggregators despite how demoralizing it feels to have your hard work being stolen without credit.
Oh btw, to answer the question of how they copied stuff, basically they use a crawler bot. It is same bot as the one used by google and yahoo and pretty much all search engines. The only difference between these crawler bots and legitimate search engines' crawler bot is in their obedience of the norobots rule. If you do not want your site to be crawled, you can set the norobots rule. What this does is tell crawler bots not to rip off your data. This is pretty much the fence that says, "Get out of my lawn!" but bad aggregators do not obey this rule. So despite the norobots rule, they will still rip off your data. This rule also has the disadvantage of almost making your site invisible to search engine, as they're not allowed to crawl all over your body, they cannot give you a site ranking. So if you're depending on google ads, sorry, this won't work for you. Another method is to put up spider traps. These will take the crawler bots and throw them into a pit of no return. As one crawler bot disappears into the pit of looping hell, another will come to find out, then disappears again. Eventually, so much of their resources will fall down into an endless loop of infinity that they will have to restart the system. The disadvantage of this method is, search engines will really hate you and will probably even label your site as malicious, if you didn't set up norobots beforehand.
Ai-channn that's my exact feeling. I'm willing to translate for free and I'm happy about it but I don't want to be blindsided. I was like this before too. I used to draw a lot many years ago, but not only did some of my drawings reuploaded somewhere, I had to fight someone who was confident enough to defend the work as hers. Which was...Idk, I lost a few braincells out of frustration that day. The dummy chapters sounds good though. I'll try that for a while. Though I want to migrate somewhere, I did put a lot of effort into my blog.
I used to do dummy chapters when I worked for a group which listed on Novel Updates. It's a lot of work and even if you don't mind that, it's not entirely foolproof. They were able to copy the genuine chapter quite often. After I moved to my own blog, I stopped listing on NU and that's the best way to ensure the aggregator bots don't crawl your site, although I still have lots of nagging notices everywhere to request that folks don't list my translations on anywhere on NU. Somebody did that once and bang! One chapter got copied almost instantly. I do use the NU forum though. The recommendations threads are quite a good way to introduce my projects to readers.
Easy. Use snipping tools on windows to capture ur work. Then publish the picture with watermark on it. At least it won't be that easy to reproduce.