Ubuntu forum posts copied to other sites

[Scooby-2]

I have written a fairly lengthy procedure to help people set up NFS for use with a Western Digital My Cloud NAS Server (WD does not support Linux clients, although this product runs Debian and runs NFS out of the box). I called it "Accessing the WD My Cloud via NFS" and posted it on 6th October. I have corrected some minor errors/omissions and I tried to Google the article. I was amazed to find copies of the post - some with the first part missing, some with the screen shots missing and some with errors!

I thought my posts were the property of Ubuntu Forums (I have no problem with that) but I am concerned that the sites containing the copies do not give credit/link to Ubuntu Forums, except one. Also, I have added minor corrections and additions to the procedures to try and explain what is happening at the command line. The copies have not been updated, meaning that poor information/misinformation is out there.

There are a number of articles on the Internet regarding NFS which are incorrect and/or misleading, particularly with regard to authorisation. I wrote the procedure at the prompt of a friend, who had this exact requirement. People who encounter the incomplete/incorrect articles are going to be frustrated, are they not? Is this part of a ploy to discredit the Ubuntu Community, or put off potential Linux users? Is it legal? Some of the sites have even added their own copyright information to "their" pages!

Sorry if I seem paranoid..... I would appreciate any feedback on this issue, particularly from the Moderators here.

Scooby-2

[coffeecat]

Sadly, this is not the first time this has come up. We had an a instance a couple of years ago where a site scraped large amounts of material from here, changed the posters' usernames and, of course, did not give any attribution. The only slightly amusing part of that episode was that they republished some spam posts that we had not yet removed!

Our data attribution policy is straightforward:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2231107

All public forum data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International License. This means that you may copy and redistribute material published here, but you must attribute it to The Ubuntu Forums (ubuntuforums.org) and republish under the same license. It also means that by posting content here, you have assigned the content of your post to the above license.

So if people are republishing forum material without attribution, they are in the wrong. I doubt this is a ploy to discredit the Ubuntu Community - rather, I would guess, a ploy by some people to get good content onto their sites without any regard for legality or good manners.

It would be helpful if you could provide links to offending sites so that we can investigate. Rather than give them the benefit of a bit of free SEO by posting them here, please email them to the Forum Council mailing list, whose address you can find in the navigation bar near the top left of the page - Forum Community -> Forum Council. Thanks.

[Scooby-2]

Thanks to coffeecat for the detailed response to both this post and to the email I sent with the links.

Proof that Ubuntu Forums is run by real people for real people.