~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

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BigBigFan
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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby BigBigFan » Tue Oct 18, 2016 11:09 pm

Hi JC, I signed up just to give you my support in this matter. As a webmaster I know it sucks when someone else blatantly copies your content, no credit given. I'm sure you know but in case you don't... there are steps you actually need to take now that you have uncovered what is essentially stolen content(copy pasta verbatim, more than a snippet's worth).

Step #1 - Send stratics a cease and desist letter with examples of copied content and explain that you do not approve. The best strategy is always to work it out directly with the offender.

Step #2 - If/when they ignore you or refuse it's time to send their host an official letter explaining the same and ask that their host do something about the situation

Step #3 - If/when that fails to produce satisfactory results for you it's time to begin filing individual DMCA notices on a per page basis, and it sounds like you might have to make hundreds of them. You will need to provide a link to the page that was copied(more than a snippet's worth, Google will not remove pages from their index if there is only a sentence of two copied. Why not? Because Google copies a snippet from every page online too, lol)

Tips: begin randomly copying page titles and see if Stratics returns the same page titles, if they do and the content is the same file a DMCA on that page. Randomly select sentences or paragraphs from within your own pages and run the checks again, sometimes the titles are different. When you file a DMCA you want to do so for every page you find, one by one, and link the copied page and the offending page along with a good paragraph or two of copied text.

At the very least you will be removing Stratics pages from the search index. DO NOT go looking around on stratics to find copied content for the purpose of DMCA notices. There is a chance Google has already ignored the stratics version because they found it to be duplicate. Trust me you WANT stratics to have loads of duplicate content pages that don't rank so that they sink in the rankings SITEWIDE. Even their non-copied pages will fall in ranking if too many pages are duplicate. Also, you need to repeat the process for Bing, but Google first.

Lastly, for future reference, there is code you can add to UOGuide that will make it harder to copy content. It disables to copy and view source functions so that they simply don't work. It's still possible to get the source code but it's more difficult and time consuming. Why make it easy?

ok, REALLY lastly... if Stratics won't fess up and do the right thing then create a page explaining the situation(like this one) and add a NOINDEX meta header tag to it so that it does not get indexed in search(don't need nofollow on links on the page, just the meta tag). Then add some code to your .htaccess that will check the referrer of incoming visitors to see if they have a stratics referrer and if they do they get redirected to your explanation page. You want to do this because if your DMCA's start taking effect and Stratics does fall in rank a bit then the incoming links from stratics are worth a bit less and may even become poisonous to uoguide(low quality). If they all point to a noindex page they are not considered in search. Make sure the redirect employs a 301 redirect, not the default 302, so that Google knows the change is permanent.

There's more you can do, if you want any help with any of the above send me a message. I really hope Stratics gets their head out of their arses on this one, content theft makes them look bad.

Good luck JC.

*edit* remember to put quotation marks around any text you're searching for in Google so that you get exact matches. I randomly did a search for "The New Player House is built by Mim Foxglove to provide inspiration and encouragement for the young ones" with quotation marks and found that you are long overdue for DMCA requests, there has to be 50 sites all copying the same words verbatim. Good news - you do rank ahead of the copies, but you want to keep it that way.

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JC the Builder
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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby JC the Builder » Wed Oct 19, 2016 10:54 am

I appreciate the encouragement Big Fan.

However, as I've already stated, I'm not going to file DMCA or sue Stratics. If they want to steal content from UOGuide then I'm not going to stop them. It is up to the community to react appropriately. Which seems to be working out well.

Also, I searched for that phrase you mentioned had 50 hits on Google. It only came up with about 30 results for me. About 10 linked to UOGuide. The rest were just excerpts of UOGuide. Like one site showed our trustworthiness. Another showed multiple sites with related content. I didn't see any direct copies of UOGuide.

zoghistorian
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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby zoghistorian » Thu Oct 20, 2016 8:11 pm

EnergyVortex wrote:Mods there are utterly malign and completely out of control.


Some of us have been saying that for, oh, 16 years. It wouldn't surprise me if my replies here eventually get reported there, and I get banned. Some of the UHall noise machines may think I got banned, but I was simply not playing the game for a year and a half.

Official forums can't come fast enough.


Just asking, did you ever hear of the official forums of years ago? They were pretty active, but I never posted for one reason: registration was tied to game accounts, so if a mod took a dislike and stretched the rules to ban you, that also banned your game account.

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JC the Builder
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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby JC the Builder » Fri Oct 21, 2016 10:03 am

zoghistorian wrote:Just asking, did you ever hear of the official forums of years ago? They were pretty active, but I never posted for one reason: registration was tied to game accounts, so if a mod took a dislike and stretched the rules to ban you, that also banned your game account.

I don't know when the official forums are coming. All I know is they are in the works and actively being worked on.

As for the possibilty of getting your UO account banned for posting: they have not released the forum rules so who knows. We don't even know if you'll need an active UO account to post. Whatever the rules are, no one should fear getting banned because someone does not like them. I have a hard time believing this will happen or that it did happen on the old official forums. Most times if a moderator does not like you it is because you are getting warned/suspended often for breaking forum rules.

I'm sure there will be plenty of discussion on this topic once the forum details come out.

zoghistorian
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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby zoghistorian » Fri Oct 21, 2016 1:35 pm

Oh yes, it did happen on the official forums years ago. Maybe they'd be more lenient today, at risk of losing revenue. Still, I wouldn't trust a forum whose registration is tied to my game accounts.

You may or may not have seen my more heated "discussions" over the years, which principally stemmed from entanglements with people who were given MUCH more leeway (including sending me PMs that clearly violated the rules, and in years past starting new threads to mock me). I mod a forum myself, whose technical nature generally obviates matters of opinion, but I must nonetheless strive for objectivity and all-around fairness.

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JC the Builder
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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby JC the Builder » Fri Oct 21, 2016 11:19 pm

zoghistorian wrote:Oh yes, it did happen on the official forums years ago. Maybe they'd be more lenient today, at risk of losing revenue. Still, I wouldn't trust a forum whose registration is tied to my game accounts.

I don't know how widespread it is, but games such as World of Warcraft, Darkfall, etc. that have official forums require an active game account. It seems to be the standard rather than an exception.

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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby Kirthag » Wed Dec 14, 2016 4:23 pm

Watched (listened) to your video JC.

I do not believe Stratics should be creating a wiki - it was my major stance before resigning as Publisher there. The content outside of the forums at Stratics is more article based, and has been since inception. Granted, there are sections that lean toward a wiki format, but over the years the development and maintenance of the content within the databases makes a conversion rather monumental. The multiple databases for Stratics are immense (I should know, I helped maintain them before I left) and really there should be no reason for plagiarism of content.

I won't comment further on the tactics or ethics of this particular situation as I made my voice rather clear over at Stratics.

Stratics making a wiki is not necessary, after all, UOGuide has been the defacto wiki for years, why remake the wheel? They are killing their SEO... *sigh* it is their choice to perform internet-seppuku - who am I to judge?

"Why not help with Stratics?" I've been asked. That is a simple question with a complicated answer I will not make public. What is honest is that my involvement in Stratics, UOGuide, and other UO-dedicated sites has been and always will be about community activism and helping new players explore the sandbox that is Ultima Online. Despite all the controversy, hullabaloo, conjecture, and guessing - I would be remiss if I didn't, still, contribute as best I can.

I thought long and hard about creating yet another website dedicated to UO - but again, why remake the wheel? I would rather help to make the wheel better...




*afterthought*
And no, I am not a 'plant' here at UOGuide. I am not here to steal, borrow, rip-off, malign or otherwise hurt UOGuide, JC, or anything of that sort. Anyone who knows me should understand that I love UO in more ways than I can write about and my contributions are made in good faith. *looks over the red links at UOGuide* There is work to be done, and I can help - simple as that.
Mair soar~ Kirthag's Player.

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Re: ~~~ UOGuide Will Not Be Going Anywhere ~~~

Postby hattie10 » Wed Jun 12, 2019 5:40 am

this is good news, thanks!


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