How to Mostly Remove the Re-blog Option on WordPress – May 12, 2020

Standard Disclaimer:

I am not an attorney and any comments I post are not intended, nor should they be construed, as legal advice. If you need legal advice, please consult a legal expert who is familiar with the area of legal expertise you need.

I mentioned in this post last night – What Makes a Blog Commercial? May 11, 2020 about removing the re-blog option on WordPress. I was on my phone at the time and haven’t mastered copy/paste for paragraphs yet.

The default option for reblog is turned on. I checked by starting a new free WordPress blog; now to figure out how to delete the new blog with no posts. The following will remove the reblog from your individual posts, but someone can still reblog from the WordPress Reader last time I checked. It’s been a while, but some of the bloggers I Follow have disabled the re-blog option for individual posts, but when I went to the WordPress Reader and looked at their individual posts, I could re-blog from the Reader. Here’s the link on how to disable re-blogging, but it’s at the bottom of the article: https://wordpress.com/support/reblogs/

Is there anyway I can disable the reblog option?

Yes, if you decide you would rather not offer the option to reblog your post, you can disable the button by navigating to My Sites → Tools → Marketing. Then click on the Sharing Buttons tab.
Disable Show reblog button under Reblog & Like and the Reblog button will no longer appear on your blog posts. Likewise, if you later decide you would like to offer users the option to reblog your content, you can enable the feature.

I would caution bloggers against accusing people who use WordPress re-blog options of “stealing” your work. I know a couple of bloggers over the years who were accused of “stealing” the original blogger’s work by using one of the re-blog options. This is different than scraping – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping someone’s blog post which is copyright violation and plagiarism rolled into one. Not sure if scraping qualifies as theft, but I doubt the scraper would get jail time in most countries. In many countries, such a claim of theft could result in the accuser of being hit with defamation, libel and/or slander (depending on if the accusation was written or spoken as in a video). There are some areas where the accuser has to prove their case or risk getting fined or otherwise punished by the courts.

I would encourage bloggers who don’t wish their posts re-blogged to politely put a notice at the top of the post asking for it not to be re-blogged.

If you have never re-blogged a post, you can get a glimpse by choosing the re-blog symbol, either in a WordPress post or the WordPress Reader (you don’t have to re-blog it, but it will show how little of the post is copied when you re-blog).