WordPress Plugin: Autoblog
by David Peralty on June 6th, 2006 
35 Comments
Elliott Back has written a new plugin called WP Autoblog which scares me a bit, as it is a plugin that allows people to use RSS feeds to make posts on their WordPress blog.
In five minutes plus however long it takes to set up the plugin, a spammer could create a spam blog, publishing feeds from a variety of popular sites and putting his adsense code on it everywhere.
Have you ever wanted to automatically post to your Wordpress blog from an RSS, ATOM, or other XML feed? Have you wanted to preserve categories, give proper author attribution, do find and replace, caching, and publish excerpts or full feeds? If you want to republish or aggregate online feeds, then this plugin is for you.
I almost wish Elliott Back had not decided to publically release his work as I can see it causing another expansion of spam blogs online and I am getting a little sick of seeing them. Though, hopefully, now some of the people and companies that have written similar programs and are charging money for it will soon be out of new customers, as free options by, reasonably sized bloggers, will hopefully do better than plugins and programs for WordPress that are paid applications.
You can download WP Autoblog from ElliottBack.com, but let me know what you think of this plugin here. I would be interested in what the common thought is on this.
I don’t like the idea of this either. I’ve had too many people do this using RSS feeds from some of my blogs and they never asked permission. Why would you want to post the contents of someone else’s feed on your blog in the first place? Just link to their site.
The only way to prevent content theft is to provide summarized Feeds. Otherwise it would be too easy to simply double your blog.
Whilst this plugin is probably bad for the blogosphere as a whole, I’ve actually been searching for something like this for months. I wanted to put all my RSS data onto “myname.com”, and this seems to be the simplest option. But I highly doubt that most people that use this plugin will be using it for personal needs like I would.
Well, I know I appreciate reading full feeds instead of summaries when I read my rss aggregator, otherwise I wind up doing too much tab flipping (of course I get to tab surf anyway when the entries consist solely of pointers to other articles a la slashdot or techdirt, but I digress).
I came across a plugin that adds a feed specific copyright notice to the end of your rss/atom feed: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugins-provided-by-taraganacom/
Wouldn’t necessarily stop anyone, but you would probably find out a lot faster when someone is doing it…
You say you almost wish Elliott Back had not decided to publically release his work as you can see it causing another expansion of spam blogs online and you are getting a little sick of seeing them.
At the same time you are announcing this plugin here. Why?
Actually, I found at the end of writing this plugin that there exists a more comprehensive plugin FeedWordpress that basically does the same thing. So, this is nothing new on the market, so to speak. I got a lot out of writing it, because I had to read up on the different syndication standards, so that makes me happy!
I published it here because I have no control over the plugins people release, I just report the news. I think Elliot has enough of a readership that it would be easy to find even if no one else reported on his plugin.
Also, I hope to see those selling similar plugins go out of business, as it bugs me even more people are making money off of selling plugins like this.
It is scary. The porn industry was the first to expose this using software like Rss2Blog and Auto Blogger Pro. I echo your sentiments and concerns as well but I’m sure the bloggers will adapt accordingly.
TDS, I just hope the search engines continue to adapt accordingly…
As Elliot noted there is already an OS plugin that does this, FeedWordPress, which has actually been around for quite a long while and seen some serious use in some circles. While some people may use these kinds of plugins for “bad” purposes there are many “good” purposes for them as well.
For one instance, using WordPress, one of these plugins and a good handpicked list of blogs, one could easily build a theme spesific aggregator listing excerpts and links to original posts in a categorized, tagged “news” format that would help readers find new relevant content without wading through unrelated garbage, and provide the blogs with interested readers, and make a small profit from adsense or some other advertising venue in the process. This is VERY easy to set up using FeedWordPress, UltimateTagWarrior and a few easily sorted out theme functions. Add a cat to email plugin and you have a full out niche interest news alert service that helps every one involved.
Also, on the copyrighting of feeds concept. I’m sceptical of the idea. Because while our words say we reserve our rights, our actions in choosing to syndicate in the clear with a vehicle like RSS say otherwise. It is not difficult to implement htpd auth in receiving feeds. If you really don’t want your feeds republished on another site, why not run two sets of feeds. Run one in the clear with just excerpts, for the spiders and engines and a second with full text behind authentication for your subscribers.
Calling foul on copyright grounds over an in the clear RSS fed article strikes me as the equivelant of taking your article to Kinkos, jamming down the copy button with a “free take one” sign, going off to lunch and being upset on your return to discover that some people are passing copies on to other people.
Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it, and that’s how a whole LOT of other people see it, and I wager that’s how the corts will see it when it finally does go through them.
I prefer more a plugin that will automated the scraping and posting process using my own articles database & content than autoposting using RSS /XML feed . It is less of spamming. I haven’t try out this plugin yet and not sure it will do the autoblogging with my articles ?
If anyone knows of any open source plugin that will do that job, please kindly let me know. Thanks.
Sure it will michael, you just need to put your articles into an rss feed format first. Drop them all into a database and set up an rss out script to serve them and then use one of these syndicator scripts to schedual posting.
This plugin looks pretty good. Although I’ve seen many comercial copies from these plugins, such is AutoBlogger Pro. The guy is actually selling the product that combines this, FeedWordpress, Sitemaps, and few other wp plugins…
This plugin is pretty good for content aggregators, I tried it and it does pretty good job for me.
I just can’t see links syndicated from the original source, how that can be achieved ?
Nice plugin though…
Hi!
I like this plugin very much, because I use the feasture of personal blog in bloglines . and the things I find are alwasy a bit of annoying to copy-paste, especially quotes and beatifully written pieces.
so I can drag em over , don’t have to worry about crediting the author….
but thats just my personal opinion..
greetings, and keep up the good work!
Bela
I tried Autoblogger Pro and it really did the job for me. Thank you for making this wonderful plugin! :)
So is there any solution to prevent other WP-AutoBlog scrap my content?
Why don’t you try to make this a positive thing. In economic way of thinking, people just hate it when other people take their work and steal their traffic because they will lose money but if “Most” people use their head and make it to profit themselves BY PUTTING LINKS TO YOUR OWN BLOG POINTING TO THEIR OWN BLOG SITE AND YOUR BLOG NAME. This will generate new traffic to your site. Since you’re having smaller sites promoting your site. Come on people.
In fact my site has been victim of this plugin… a spam blog call gonzalolopez.net is used all my post to make money!!!
How can i avoid that??
are those scripts legal?
http://www.getaio.com
Are you sure? i heard that its not working.
How to replace a text with a link ?
What code should I use ?
TDS, I just hope the search engines continue to adapt accordingly
How to replace a text with a link
but, actually, a year ago, I using that plugin
Hi!
I am going to use this plugin for a legit cause.
I have a Swedish news site and different economy blogs and I plan to build a economy portal which shows the latest news from the different sites. Since they all don’t use the same database I have to export the data somehow and using rss is a good choice.
Another solution from sitemile, yet another automatic poster: http://www.sitemile.com/p/auto-post-plugin
I interested about this, i will try it thanks ur information :)
While I love the idea of being able to post automatically from an RSS feed I agree with you that this is subject to abuse by sploggers.
I love the idea of it. Yes, it will bring out the splogging in people, but it is something that a lot of people want, including myself. It comes down to demand of the market place and I’d say there is plenty.
I plan to build a fashion blog which shows the latest news from the different places using RSS feeds to make posts. But I want to make it looks like a real posts. So, are those posts from RSS feeds looks like a real ones?
lol… and 2 year later, you can auto blog porn videos with WordPress…
satan or genius? >> http://porn-site-builder.com
@author, nice prediction!