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Today I noticed that a recent question here on ELL appears elsewhere on the web, namely at languageusage.com (http​://www.languageusage.com/q/answers-why-is-this-sentence-correct-137503.html) (the other question on that page appears on ELU). My first thought was that the same question had been asked in two places, but a little poking around reveals that the question and its answer have been automatically copied.

The footer of the site claims that all content hosted there is licenced under cc-wiki, but that document clearly specifies that attribution is required:

If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material.

Do we have any recourse against these practices? I participate here because of the unique strengths of the StackExchange community and it displeases me that an entity I don't support could profit from my work without so much as a reference back to the original source, my user profile, or information about the StackExchange network.

Update: Per Wendi’s suggestion below, I’ve reported the two mentioned above, as well as this question appearing elsewhere on the web, which I noticed today. Please feel free to edit this post upon reporting any other SCRAPERs (great acronym, by the way).

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    This problem is at least 2 years old. See this related ELU meta post for more information.
    – J.R. Mod
    Dec 4, 2013 at 18:44
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    Avoid posting working links to sites like these--it helps their pagerank. (I removed the link syntax and inserted a zero-width space in the URL to break the automatic linkification.)
    – user230
    Dec 4, 2013 at 22:30

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Check out this post on MSO. It tells you what information needs to be sent along to the SE team to take care of problems like these (you use the Contact link at the bottom of the page to email them). Here's the most relevant information from that post:

Send all reports of SCRAPERs to us via the contact form linked at the bottom of every page. Please include:

  • the URL of the copied post
  • the URL of the original post on SE
  • for high-rankers, the search string you used (and the name of the search engine, if not Google)
  • any other details you noticed and want to share, because you're awesome
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  • Thanks, Wendi. I'll file some reports when I can carve out a decent block of time. I'd really appreciate the support of anyone inclined to do the same, and I'm more than happy to curate a list of reported posts if people wish to comment above or email me.
    – Tyler James Young
    Dec 4, 2013 at 19:10
  • Hmmm.... Grrrr...
    – J.R. Mod
    Dec 8, 2013 at 8:57
  • @J.R. Argh. Report!
    – WendiKidd
    Dec 8, 2013 at 18:30

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