Today’s plugin review is for BlogAvenger, a plugin that is supposed to let you copyright everything on your blog. It’s built to ward off the “hordes of despicable content thieves that come scurrying across the web intent on only one thing: stealing our content!”
If you say so.
BlogAvenger wards off these hordes by disabling text selection, watermarking local images, creating DMCA notices, and banning known scrapers.
Seems like a pretty powerful little plugin. Let’s take a closer look, shall we.
Earlier I said BlogAvenger is supposed to let you copyright everything on your blog. I said ‘suposed to’ because when I went to activate my complimentary copy of BlogAvenger this appeared:
Apparently my server doesn’t have Ioncube support, which is a requirement for BlogAvenger to run. So that’s a total bummer.
What I can tell you is that BlogAvenger is a $29 plugin. This price is a $50 markdown from the standard price of $79. Not cheap either way you slice it. What’s a bit odd to me is that it doesn’t seem like they are using BlogAvenger on the BlogAvenger site.
Now, their site, to the best of my knowledge, is not a WordPress site, so clearly that can’t use a WordPress plugin on it, but why wouldn’t they want to show what BlogAvenger can do?
It’s one thing to write out what it can do, why not prove it by using it on it’s own site. From the BlogAvenger site I was able to copy and paste text and save an image to my desktop with no watermark. Obviously I got rid of these things afterwards, but it made no sense to me. If there really are hordes of evil content thieves scouring the internet for stuff to steal, why not protect the site of a product intent on doing in these trolls?
All in all, I’m bummed that people have got to spend a good chunk of money just to see this thing in action. I’d love for BlogAvenger to put their money where their mouth is and make some sample sites available for us to look at before we shell out cash.
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