Not sure where to put this but it is a gneral guestion so…
Three of four years ago there was a faux Straight Dope site that was reproducing SDMB’s forums, threads and even our usernames. I was cloned on there as both TV time and TB time if I remember correctly.
What ever happened to that site? And did anyone ever find out why they did it?
You aren’t talking about the time the boards went down and they ported them over to another host, are you? If so, you can probably get the details in ATMB.
No.
This was something else.
IIRC, it was a site with a China address. Since copying verbatim is pretty obviously a copyright violation, I suspect they get poked with a few ChiTown lawyers.
A few months ago another clone site popped up, and I think it was suspected that it was the same group at work.
Wasn’t the whole website chicken based?
Yeah it was called Cockadoodledoo, I think. And people had user titles based on all things poultry.
Was really rather scary.
Thread on the Cockadoodledoo board:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=295910&page=1&pp=50
That was fairly recent. I think the OP is talking about an older incident, which is mentioned briefly in the linked thread - Metasus or something.
Close - Meatus.
Yeah, that was it. Meatus - For those of you who weren’t here at the time, it was really strange we would post on SDMB and the same exact thread would appear on it, but it would have weird typos in the usernames. Or some usernames were the same and some others weren’t used at all.
I seem to remember that at the time, someone said, as Musicat just said, that it was based in China. I think Hong Kong or Macau.
But I was wondering about the outcome and the reason.
I know they said they turned it over to the Reader’s rabid team o’ lawyers, but they never told us what came of it, AFAIK.
Stealing from the SDMB? Metatus.com
I kept up with them for a while. Spamming is what finally did them in.
After pulling a stunt like that, they should have gotten poked by a few ChiTown businessmen of the old school.
So is the chicken site still stealing some of our stuff? I looked over there a little while ago, and though I cannot read posts without registering, I noticed that the most recent posts in several threads were by members with names eerily similar to those of our board.
I had forgotten that you were the one that broke that information to the board Berkut.
Thnks for the update (and trip down Memory Lane).
TV