ArticleSnatch Blog

currently the server is encoding the site incorrectly and thus it is not viewable by your browser, we are working to resolve this quickly.

update: we have a temporary fix in place, by disabling the gzip output, things should be working better.

Update: – everythng is back up and running

Today we were informed that someone going by the name of Santosh Bhol from an Indian SEO Company, www.kkblr.com (PLEASE DON’T visit it set off my antivirus when I tried) was stealing articles from other authors and using them. I double checked what someone had emailed me and Mr. Bhol had copied pieces of articles from ArticleSnatch.com and put them back together and then submitted the articles right back to us.

I’m surprised that someone would have such audacity to do so.

The issue of course has been resolved, but it is still surprising to see some of the steps that some people will go through to try to get the word out about their site.

Even worse, was that Mr. Bhol didn’t even bother to include links in the resource box, rather just in the body of the article, where up till a few months ago, they would have been filtered out and not shown. Clearly he’s show his claim of 3 years experience to be kind of invalid.

Anyway enough about that guy.

The editorial team is continuing to review accounts and remove things from the site as well as keep approving the new stuff. So as always, if you have any questions feel free to comment below or email us.

First Merry Christmas everyone, sure Christmas is December 25th, but that was yesterday, so I’m a tad late. I hope you had a safe and happy holiday.

Just got done fixing the site after some hacker at 5:33 EST from an ip address of 211.72.36.100 decided to hack our site and insert a random redirect code. I guess he wanted to earn a little christmas cash as well. Oh well Hackers are losers and thats that. Not much else to do right.

We have worked on securing the hole that was found to reduce the risk of that in the future. Pretty sure the hole is wordpress (thanks guys). Not that many people would be surprised by that….

The editorial team over here has been working hard as well to get more authors reviewed, but if you would like us to review your account, please send an email to webmaster AT articlesnatch Dot com. We will take a look at it.

If you haven’t logged in a while, login, check some of your links. We are not approving anyone linking to parked domains, for sale domains, or domains that redirect you to 80 different places.

If you have articles in your account that you wouldn’t want a 5 year old to read, you might want to think about removing them. We have been working to remove all content like that and sometimes people just get everything banned if there is too much bad stuff. These topics also include replica junk, pharma, online casinos, etc. If you know that you have submitted those in the past, please login and delete them.

Have a great day and look forward to hearing your feedback, feel free to coment below or email us. If you do leave a comment, don’t use a keyword as your name, we will just mark it as spam…

We have a comment policy on this blog, it is linked from every page as well as by the comment form, yet we continue to get “people” who leave comments using a keyword instead of their name. Even though the comment form very clearly says to use your Name.

Well we have stopped reading these comments and just mark them all as spam. So if you want to leave a productive comment, feel free. If you are just looking for another anchor text link to your likely spam filled site, we will just mark it as spam…

that’s enough rant for now, perhaps later I’ll post about the “Entertainment” company that sent an email accusing us of copyright violations in regards to an article that they hired a firm in India to submit. So they hire out someone to write and submit the article and then accuse us of distributing copies of their film. What on earth is going on.

Its been a pretty busy weekend, we have been reviewing authors to get the nofollow removed, if you would like us to review your account send us an email, most who email us have accounts reviewed within a business day hour.

So far we have reviewed authors who have contributed 74000 total articles (UPDATE 12/14 9pm 108,700 articles). Our moderation team is working to get everyone reviewed, but with over 100,000 authors it is a time consuming process.

These changes have been called drastic and an over reaction, that may be true in some authors minds, but instead of over reacting, remember that the changes are TEMPORARY. Remember a link that is followed but on a page that is not in the index doesn’t matter, so pl

We have had a few injection attacks as well, currently we have caught injections from astralarena.com and atsignart.com, if you see something that doesn’t look right, or acts funny, notify us immediately so our staff can take a look.

We are working to remove the nofollow from every legitimate author on the site that might have gotten mixed in the with the bad.

Find something that looks like it doesn’t belong on the site, contact us and we will take a look.

Got a suggestion or want to see something new? send us an email or reply below, be sure to read the comment policy.

For those who have been keeping track, it has been a longer than we originally hoped to get the author review process in place to remove the nofollow from your links (Read about the nofollow and other changes here). Thanks in part due to a call from a distressed author, we got the programmer kicked into gear to get the ball rolling on the author review.

We can now review your account, note whether your write quality content and link to quality sites – if so – then the nofollow will be removed from your links. If you write terrible articles, and link to bad neighborhoods, etc, then we can mark the account as reviewed and leave the nofollow in place.

Currently we are reviewing authors based on the number of articles submitted, as well as the date of the last login. So authors who are submitting articles regularly will be reviewed first. If you would like to skip the queue, please feel free to email us at webmaster at articlesnatch dot com. (piece that back together.)

This will also remove the nofollow from your profile page — you did take the time to edit your profile right? You are allowed several links there and several paragraphs of space for you to write whatever you want about you and your company, etc. That profile page is linked from every article you submit, so its likely a good idea to get that filled out.

We are working on an option for you to opt out of having the in text ads from showing up on your site – these are the ads served by kontera within the body of the article. If you would like them blocked from your account, we can take note of that, and we are working to get it implemented shortly. If there is just one advertiser you want to see blocked, email us and we can take a look at that as well.

New Feature: Automagically Converting Urls to Links

We have turned on a function that will take a url in the resource box and turn it into a link, so if you forget to include the actual html code for your url, the system will turn it into a link on rendering. This will only work if your url looks something like http://www.articlesnatch.com it won’t work without the http.

As always we are open to feedback and making improvements to the site, email us, leave a comment, etc. Remember we have a comment policy.

Today we upgraded to the latest version of Wp Super Cache – which I think is just great. It is pretty tried and trued and has saved us a lot of head aches in other projects.

We are also running w3 total cache, but experimenting with using its built in memcached funcationalities to cache database queries.

Just uploaded WP Minify as well as a test to combine and minify js/css files before sending them to users. I’m not sure if its a good thing or a bad thing yet. Before we were running just a minify function of the w3 total cache.

Lets see how it goes, thoughts comments?

We are approaching roughly one month since we put into place a LOT of changes to the site. We are still working on many more improvements to the site and decrease page load times and optimize the speed of the site as well as quality of the information delivered.

Traffic to the site has increased (global traffic has increased sharply) and is back to more than it was before the filter was applied at the end of august.

A lot of moderating has taken place with thousands of articles removed. Oddly enough only one person has contacted us and asked us why their articles promoting an online casino were removed. articles linking to online casinos aren’t allowed plain and simple (but we are looking to creating a space for them either here or on another site).

We have caught and removed several large spammers – but i’m sure more will still show up to fill their shoes.

If your reading this and you have noticed that all of your articles are suddenly gone when you try to find them, feel free to email us and we will be happy to discuss your situation with you case by case. Some people had articles removed because of bad email addresses, linking to questionable neighborhoods, etc.

The growth we have seen in the last month is causing us to expand to some new hardware as well, this will help the site continue to be able to handle the traffic in addition to improve the stability and accessibility of the site.

We have started testing some new ad formats — if you have feed back about any of the ads on the site, please email us or use the contact form, we would love to hear thoughts and opinions on them.

Thats all for now — back to work on some more changes for the site. feel free to leave comments & thoughts here.

Just saw this on twitter – and while I would like to hope its a joke, it would certainly make sense if it wasn’t.

I don’t really if ever go to McDonald’s but i know other drive thru places quite often screw up orders. Every time something is messed up you have to stop and say “is it worth going back for” – was it messed up because the employees just made a mistake – or was it intentional?

Thoughts comments?

Verizon Wireless and Google announced today that they will be working together to co develop several phones to take advantage of VZW’s 3G network as well as the Google Android platform.

I’m quite thrilled about this, I’ve been waiting for something neat to come out that doesn’t run on the AT&T network — around here its garbage — as is T-Mobile (which I understand works great in california) – but not in many other places. Sure there are always Blackberry’s to go to, but some of the things that Android can do are pretty cool.

While this may not be the end all to the Iphone – it sure might make some headway for all those who are frustrated with AT&T’s data network under performing. Or those who have just been waiting to enjoy their friends and family plan with a cool phone as well.

Let see what happens.