Strange foreign website reposting forum threads

[waterlubber]

When doing a search for my Kegway (because I'm far too lazy to actually check the forums ) I came across a strange site that seems to be reposting every single (popular) forum thread and stealing views...I'm not sure exactly what it is but I am sure it's violating a lot of copyrights/ToS/being a general jerk.

Here it is. Beware, I'm not sure if this site is infected or something because I use Linux. It seems to be okay, but I'd check it in a VM if using Windows...

http://kerbal-tutti.blogspot.com/

I'm just bringing this (shady) site to the attention of the community. Not sure where to put this, so I put it here.

[worir4]

Uh, not sure if safe to press link. I wont risk it however I think some websites do repost what is said here.

[sumghai]

The blogger, salamp, appears to have started a number of blogs that harvest posts/threads from various forums and communities.

Since one of its posts even contains plain text version of standard forums headers/foots (e.g. posting permissions), I suspect that "salamp" is actually a bot that reposts content to bump itself up in Google Search results and earn money by exploiting AdSense.

Edited April 23, 2015 by sumghai

[Yukon0009]

So is Squad going to do anything about it? Asking.

[r4pt0r]

I've reported this too. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/106248-What-is-this-site

[Fel]

So is Squad going to do anything about it? Asking.

Can they actually do anything? All the guy is doing is crawling the pages... it may even simply be using the RSS feed. And does squad really have any copyright permissions over the content users post, other than the right to host it?

Well, you could try this, at least:

"I hereby license this post under the Electronic Arts default license and forbid redistribution of said post without explicit permission from its creator, Fel. Any redistribution of said post will result in punitive damages of no less than 1 million USD. I hereby provide SQUAD permission to host said post solely on their servers at forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com"

[RAINCRAFTER]

I've seen this before in the other thread about this.

[Commander Jebidiah]

Strange, when i click on the link it has '.com' at the end but after about 1 second it changes to '.co.uk' yet the language is french.

[pxi]

Strange, when i click on the link it has '.com' at the end but after about 1 second it changes to '.co.uk' yet the language is french.

That's typical with blogspot sites. I get a .ie version when I follow a blogspot.com link.

[Kerbart]

Can they actually do anything? All the guy is doing is crawling the pages... it may even simply be using the RSS feed. And does squad really have any copyright permissions over the content users post, other than the right to host it?

1) Yes, they can do something about it. Not about the crawling itself. But the "incentive" for crawling is monetizing it through advertising it (as Sumghai mentioned, likely AdSense) and reporting him to AdSense and other services will quickly put an end to his income and thus his actions.

2) I'm pretty sure the TOS of the forum contains some boilerplate that prohibits this behavior.

[Cydonian Monk]

I'm always amused when I find things I post copied to other "scraped" sites. Sometimes I find out from the server logs where I host my images (because the scrapers are too lazy to change the links), but usually through Google (or DuckDuckGo! Leave the Big-G behind!). It's something that's been going on for at least a decade, and unlikely to change anytime soon. Whatever the motives (negligible ad money), they'll always find some way around the countermeasures thrown against them. Just have to be vigilant when pressing links.

[Fel]

1) Yes, they can do something about it. Not about the crawling itself. But the "incentive" for crawling is monetizing it through advertising it (as Sumghai mentioned, likely AdSense) and reporting him to AdSense and other services will quickly put an end to his income and thus his actions.

That would make sense, anyone could then report him.

Adsense likely has TOS that states something akin to "You are prohibited from using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to raise your income or w/e"