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About a month ago, I made this post.

However, I found out just now that my post is showing up verbatim in other sites.

  1. https://mail.queryxchange.com/q/3_1085977/no-gui-after-kubuntu-18-10-upgrade-from-18-04-lts/
  2. https://wyldeplayground.net/no-gui-after-kubuntu-18-10-upgrade-from-18-04-lts/

I'm wondering what's up with that. I know for a fact that I did not make those posts in those other sites. In fact, I don't even have accounts with them or anything.

Are those sites simply mining other sites for content or something? Is this a case where StackExchange is providing the data in a way that they have access to (e.g. API access, etc), or is it simply that they're making regular HTTP requests and parsing the data themselves, etc?

I'm just wondering how my questions were somehow duplicated in those sites.

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  • Use the "Contact Us" page at the bottom to report scrapers to SE Employees.
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Nov 20, 2018 at 17:10
  • @ThomasWard What do they do about it?
    – code_dredd
    Nov 20, 2018 at 17:12
  • Not our problem, that's something SE Legal does about it, not us. (Report it anyways)
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Nov 20, 2018 at 17:12

1 Answer 1

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Are those sites simply mining other sites for content

Yes.

The database is pretty much open. There is an database explorer to query the database for instance. So asking that for the last 1000 questions is pretty easy and all you then need is a website to show it.

Oh, and you only found those 2? :) If I search for my username and skip the 1st few pages of google results it starts showing tens of sites similar to that one.

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  • Well, only those two close to the top of my results; I wasn't searching for this stuff specifically. I just ran into the by mere coincidence.
    – code_dredd
    Nov 20, 2018 at 7:46
  • BTW, I wasn't aware of the database explorer. Thanks for the URL.
    – code_dredd
    Nov 20, 2018 at 7:47
  • I even found a site askubuntu.ru which doesn't seem to be legit. Though I don't know russian. ;-)
    – Kulfy
    Nov 20, 2018 at 16:02

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