What are the risks in running wp-autoblog and the like?

[hony]

I'm using feedwordpress which I bvelieve is similair, but not the same.

Problems I've found is that it will sometimes update an old post instead of create a new post. I think this is something wrong with the sponsor feed though (changing the content but leaving some "key" values the same). That's a guess.

Duplicate content is a concern from a SEO perspective -- I attempt to tackle that with some automatic word substituations so the text will not be *identical* (but admittedly extremely similar) to other blogs using the same feeds.

So far it seems ok.

[Bill]

Thanks Walrus, that version of the plugin behaved differently and seemed to work. (altho the feed, when it was made into posts, lost the links to the galleries that were clearly there in the feed itself when viewed thru ie7 - which is to say, it didn't really work, because the resulting posts were missing the critical links.)

So, based on reading a few other posts, I was wondering if there was a tool like this that made drafts, rather than posts. That way you could edit the draft to make it more unique, and weed out the stuff that doesn't work.

But it sounds like no such plugin exists?

[walrus]

I would assume that the links were probably in the author section and you are not giving attribution to the original author. But thats just a guess. Before you do that you may want to edit the plug-in as it's author likes to add his own little bit to it as well.

I haven't found a plugin that will read to draft instead of post.

[Bill]

Originally Posted by walrus

I would assume that the links were probably in the author section and you are not giving attribution to the original author. But thats just a guess. Before you do that you may want to edit the plug-in as it's author likes to add his own little bit to it as well.

I thought that was a possibility, selected giving attribution to original author, and reran the script - no change in the posts it had already made. Then I removed the feed url I was testing from the settings, planning to experiment more with it later.

What do you mean, edit the plugin? What would I edit out, in this case?

[walrus]

It won't change the posts that have already been made. You'll need to delete a post and then re-run the script. It only updates the database when it finds something has changed.

You could edit wp-autoblog.php line 161

$post['post_content'] .= ' and <em>software</em> by <a href="http://elliottback.com">Elliott Back</a>';
} else {
$post['post_content'] .= 'Created using <em>software</em> by <a href="http://elliottback.com">Elliott Back</a>';

and remove the link.

I'm not a php kind of guy so I simply did this:

$post['post_content'] .= ' ';
} else {
$post['post_content'] .= ' ';