TSUSports.com: Visit TSUSports.com for information about Tigers Athletics 2
- Thread starter TigerFans
- Start date
Long story short, I scrape their data via RSS feed. He's publishing articles so that they appear for my scraper to pick up, then immediately tries to delete the story, so that TigerFans data is looking like a fool. Charles has been notified that I'm aware of the shady practices.
What was the response from Charles? He's purposely trying to disregard the efforts of TigerFans. I wish the athletic departments would focus on athletics and not all the other re-tweeting stuff (theUndefeated, or stuff about Baylor) they do. They should leave all the other stuff up to TigerFans.
Warning... there's a wall of text below...
I'll paraphrase and summarize, but Andrew explained that it was an effort by Sidearm Sports "to further increase the exclusivity of the content published on" the official website. Charles bought the explanation from Andrew (as any manager should do, trust their employees), but he explicitly stated to "feel free to use the information we put on the website but it is now disallowed to use the above mention [sic] process". He's referencing a "cut and paste copy process for others to re-post the exact content from our site".
Keep in mind up to this point, the articles TigerFans put on the main page of TigerFans.net was a headline, an image (if any), and a sentence or two, followed by a link to the original article to read the rest of the article in full.
I believed the articles to be FULLY COMPLIANT with Fair Use:
1) Main page shows headline and image (example)
2) Clicking to read the article snippet did not use the image (example)
3) Article snippet showed little about the article itself and led the end user to TSUSports.com (see #2 for example)
The whole issue I believe is because of social media. TigerFans has grown organically and as such has high engagement relative to our followers on all platforms. A majority of people see an image, read a headline, then take an action (share, retweet, etc.) and this is where we were doing better than them and I don't think Andrew liked that.
The sad part is all I was doing was helping drive traffic to them and temporarily I've halted that. Also temporarily and out of spite, I've changed it to now grab the entirety of the articles. THIS is what they thought I was doing before.
In reply to your issue about them retweeting others... they're trying to copy what we do, but they're missing the mark on their target audience. In my initial talks with Andrew, when he was asking us to help TSU Athletics, I explained to him how we would help manage their official account -- to leave the official account noise-free and leave the noise to TigerFans, that TigerFans can say "fuck Rice" and TXSOTigers cannot and would not retweet something like that, but score updates would/could be shared. This was primarily due to the fact that their account was not updating any scores until after the game(s) were complete. They've since improved on that facet, but now they have all this noise that the TigerFans audience prefers and an official athletics account should not be doing.
I've written too much... I'll stop now.
I'll paraphrase and summarize, but Andrew explained that it was an effort by Sidearm Sports "to further increase the exclusivity of the content published on" the official website. Charles bought the explanation from Andrew (as any manager should do, trust their employees), but he explicitly stated to "feel free to use the information we put on the website but it is now disallowed to use the above mention [sic] process". He's referencing a "cut and paste copy process for others to re-post the exact content from our site".
Keep in mind up to this point, the articles TigerFans put on the main page of TigerFans.net was a headline, an image (if any), and a sentence or two, followed by a link to the original article to read the rest of the article in full.
I believed the articles to be FULLY COMPLIANT with Fair Use:
1) Main page shows headline and image (example)
2) Clicking to read the article snippet did not use the image (example)
3) Article snippet showed little about the article itself and led the end user to TSUSports.com (see #2 for example)
The whole issue I believe is because of social media. TigerFans has grown organically and as such has high engagement relative to our followers on all platforms. A majority of people see an image, read a headline, then take an action (share, retweet, etc.) and this is where we were doing better than them and I don't think Andrew liked that.
The sad part is all I was doing was helping drive traffic to them and temporarily I've halted that. Also temporarily and out of spite, I've changed it to now grab the entirety of the articles. THIS is what they thought I was doing before.
In reply to your issue about them retweeting others... they're trying to copy what we do, but they're missing the mark on their target audience. In my initial talks with Andrew, when he was asking us to help TSU Athletics, I explained to him how we would help manage their official account -- to leave the official account noise-free and leave the noise to TigerFans, that TigerFans can say "fuck Rice" and TXSOTigers cannot and would not retweet something like that, but score updates would/could be shared. This was primarily due to the fact that their account was not updating any scores until after the game(s) were complete. They've since improved on that facet, but now they have all this noise that the TigerFans audience prefers and an official athletics account should not be doing.
I've written too much... I'll stop now.