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I've been searching around and came across this website: ubuntuask.com

Disregarding the obvious similarity in the domain name, from what I can see, all their data is copied from Ask Ubuntu.

For example, check the question: How to NOT become a root user? Are administrators root?

  • Here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/245201/how-to-not-become-a-root-user-are-administrators-root
  • There http://www.ubuntuask.com/q/answers-how-to-not-become-a-root-user-are-administrators-root-245201.html

According to the Ask Ubuntu footer

user contributions licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required

But in that website, I do not see any of the questions/answers being referred to Ask Ubuntu. In fact, I searched around that website, I cannot see a single mention of Ask Ubuntu unless the OP of a question or an answer explicitly mentions it.

And, although all external links keeps redirecting to the correct page eventually (First you need to go through some form of an ad page), all links that should link to Ask Ubuntu, are modified and they all link to www.ubuntuask.com.

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    I've nuked the links to their site to try to avoid Google crawling them from any sort of relevant site.
    – Oli Mod
    Jul 31, 2013 at 10:04

3 Answers 3

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Absolutely.

It seems that the people at ubuntuask.com have a different (meaning "wrong") interpretation of the license.

It actually says not only that attribution is required, but that attribution is required in the manner specified by the author or licensor, which - on Stack Exchange - includes this:

So let me clarify what we mean by attribution. If you republish this content, we require that you:

  1. Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.
  2. Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345)
  3. Show the author names for every question and answer Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username)
  4. Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username)

(from http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/)

There's a question where you can report this site at SO Meta. Please add a new answer to it.

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    Alright, added it as an answer here meta.stackexchange.com/questions/131846/…
    – Dan
    Jul 31, 2013 at 10:28
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    I just don't get why people want to do this in the first place...
    – Seth
    Jul 31, 2013 at 17:01
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    @Seth: Their reasoning is probably simple, I guess they want to earn money by displaying ads, but for that they need traffic. To get traffic, they try to be seen by as many google searches as possible. And for that they need content, and that's why the content is stolen. And probably none of the expects that SE might take any action on that. Jul 31, 2013 at 19:07
  • @RafałCieślak That's a very good supposition.
    – Seth
    Jul 31, 2013 at 20:08
  • @RafałCieślak That's a partial explanation, but copying Stack Exchange content would be okay if attribution were given. Perhaps they don't do that because they think people would just come to Ask Ubuntu if they knew that's where the content is from. (They are probably correct to think people would come here if they revealed we were the source.) Jul 31, 2013 at 20:42
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In addition to not providing any links of any kind for attribution, that site also doesn't correctly state author names. I don't just mean they don't link to authors' profiles.

On posts where one Ask Ubuntu user created an answer, and the most recent edit was by some other Ask Ubuntu user, that site gives the display name of the editor; as far as I can see, the display name of the original author is nowhere to be found. (In contrast, on Ask Ubuntu they are both shown ...and most of the time, the original author of a post is its primary author, so if only one author's name were shown, it should be that one.)

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I'm pretty sure that you've stumbled upon a non finished version, because ubuntuask lacks hell a lot of basic functionalities (or at least I can't find them, such as asking a question, user accounts text and pictures are garbled). Maybe it's only a testing website, hm? :)

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    The first thing you do when you copy someone else's content is get the license straight, not work on other "features".
    – Seth
    Aug 2, 2013 at 16:03

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