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Like the title said, I found a website that seems to be copying at least solved questions from AskUbuntu and presenting them in more of a forum format. I asked about it in chat and was directed to report it. Here's where the problem is: the website does have source links, which creates a problem. Is this website OK or should it be reported?

Here's the website: http://ubuntusolved.com/

The site does show avatars and does link to the appropriate questions, answers and profiles on AskUbuntu, but it also hides the URL names on hover (it won't say AskUbuntu) and it doesn't have names under avatars.

I'm honestly not sure if this is even on-topic here, but I was directed here to ask for clarification.

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Let's take a look!

According to the official guidelines for scrapers, all scrapers must have the following things:

  • Visually indicate that the content is from StackExhange in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine. [Okay, it does this]
  • Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345) [Drat, it does this too.]
  • Show the author names for every question and answer [It doesn't do this!]
  • Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username) [I guess it does this too]

So, right out of the box it already has a violation.

However, let's dig a bit deeper!

Again in the official guidelines:

By “directly”, I mean each hyperlink must point directly to our domain in standard HTML visible even with JavaScript disabled, and not use a TinyURL URL or any other form of obfuscation or redirection. Furthermore, the links must not be nofollowed.

If we break out our web inspection tool, we notice something interesting:

So it does use a nofollow.

And, it might be worth to mention that the social links at the bottom redirect back to UbuntuSolved. Not good.


TL;DR: It would be proper to report this page as they're not following attribution guidelines by not including usernames and by including rel=nofollow.

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    How does it visually indicate the content is from Stack Exchange? All I see is a tiny "source" link. No visual indication it's from SE.
    – Seth
    Nov 11, 2015 at 3:11
  • UPDATE: looks like the copyright hammer swung at them. I used isitup.org FINAL ANSWER: it's removed
    – user527600
    Apr 28, 2016 at 3:30

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