PSA on RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot

I discovered two new bots in my server logs last week: RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot. They come from RSS Amplifier and Brisk News respectively. Bot sites are built by Profullstack, Inc. I discovered that RSS Amplifier, unbeknownst to me, had been crawling New Leaf Journal’s ATOM feed and re-publishing (albeit they would not describe it as such) the entire contents of my article under the RSS Amplifier banner (note it appears it took entire articles because I offer full-text feeds; it had truncated entries for sites that do not offer full text feeds). While the articles are attributed with links back to my original source, I do not approve of wholesale re-publishing (as should have been clear from my About Page). Worse yet, RSS Amplifier describes its purpose in part as making articles from around the web readily available for AI crawlers (live About Page) and they sell access to their data (live Training Data page). Brisk News appears to host articles from around the web with AI summaries, but there is less information about the project on site.

I present this information for the consideration of my fellow webmasters. I took it upon myself to block both RSS Amplifier and Brisk News at the server level and have a pending take-down request with RSS Amplifier. Alternatively, a webmaster who wants to be part of the collection may want to test whether the team responds to requests about data handling (RSS Amplifier does insist you can make a request to be in the directory but not have your site’s data sold, but I have my doubts on how that would work in practice). In any event, for those who are interested in learning more:

• My full report on NLJ with archived links, notes, and opinions
• My Codeberg repository for .htaccess and robots.txt blocks, both of which include RSSAmplifierBot and BriskBot

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