Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Please Bear With Me

The past 24 hours have been a bit of a whirlwind. I have received news from several readers and friends that someone has stolen photos off my blog. From what I can gather, she has been passing off photos of my child as photos of her child. It is scary and beyond creepy.

My blog has a readership of about 30,000 readers/month. Which is actually not a huge readership. But it's not small either. I guess it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

I am so sick over this incident. I have contacted Blogger. The police have been notified. So far, the blog in question is still up. I don't know what else to do.

I can't take the pictures down because she "right-clicked" on them from my blog and saved them to her computer before uploading them.

I feel SICK about it.

Ugh.

I think I may have to take my blog private, which I really don't want to do. I love the blogging community. I have made so many wonderful connections through my blog. I have re-connected with so many friends. I have made new, amazing friends through my blog.

I love that anyone who is experiencing pregnancy loss can come to my blog and see that life goes on and a "new normal"- a new kind of happy is possible.

The good news is that a bunch of people, all from different parts of my life, emailed me to let me know that they saw the offending blog and wanted me to know about it. So at least I know my friends have my back!

This blog may go private temporarily until I can figure out a better solution. We shall see.

3 comments:

The Amazing Trips said...

It happened to me, too. Someone snagged pictures AND my triplet birth story off my blog. It was definitely upsetting but that's a risk you take when you post on the internet. It just happened again with the band that snagged my Santa photo, this past Christmas. You'd think people who WRITE music for a living would recognize the importance of copyright. But no.

Funny enough, when you have a 30K+ readership, people who read your blog and have grown to know your family, are like your eyes and ears around the web. Whenever I've heard of my blog photos/words showing up elsewhere, it's because one of my readers has informed me. (They're an awesome bunch!)

Your blog is great and I'm certain that many people have stumbled upon it and been so thankful for your words and stories.

Good luck in your decision. I hope the icky feeling passes, quickly. I know it too well.

Brensmama said...

Erika, that is terrible!! I seriously don't understand people. Thinking of you and your family and hoping it all gets straightened out very soon!

Lauren said...

I'm so sorry this happened to you, Erika! I'm sure you feel violated and (like you said) sick about it. Who would do that?!? This recently happened to one of the Quad Mom's that I keep up with on blogger. I disabled the right-click function on my blog, but that won't really stop a true hacker from stealing photos. If you want that html code to do that I can email you it.

Thanks for inviting me to read your blog, I'd really miss you guys if I couldn't read up on what the Fun Finns were doing.

Hugs,
Lauren