imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?

Sorry, I wasn't sure where to put this but I found a forum which seemed very similar content-wise to chinese-forums.com:

http://chinaonline.cn.com/ASK/forums/11/ShowForum.aspx

Funny how these two threads on flirting have the same posts.

http://chinaonline.cn.com/ASK/forums/thread/2162.aspx

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/1036-pronunciation-of-%e8%bf%99%e4%b8%aa8&highlight=flirting

Roddy "uses" the alias "napkin" on this thread:

http://chinaonline.cn.com/ASK/forums/thread/1807.aspx

Using a PDA to learn Chinese

http://chinaonline.cn.com/ASK/forums/2894/ShowThread.aspx#2894

And they allow guest posting . . .

napkin? I thought rose~ was bad enough

btw, the main page it comes from reasonably quite well known for jobs in Shanghai.

Now that's just annoying. When it's some daft little school kid doing it you can kind of ignore them, but when it's someone who should know better . . .

Not sure there's a great deal to be done though.

LOL...

The oldest scam in the book.

http://chinaonline.cn.com/ASK/forums/11/ShowForum.aspx is too lazy to make their own content, so they steal content from chinese-forums.com and post it on their forum to make it look like their own members posted.

They do this because they want search engines to spider their content and send them visitors, but they do not want to spend the time promoting their forums, getting new members and getting content / posts the natural way.

I've seen this before many times

Yeah, me too, all too often. I mean, they've left my name at the bottom of 'my' posts. How stupid do you have to be to do that? If you're going to do that kind of thing, at least use a bit of sense - they could at least automate it with an RSS aggregator and save themselves some copying and pasting

Holy dogmess batman... they have even pilfered some of my stuff...

"I have heard that the shoalin temples are perhpas not the best places if you are serious about learning Gong Fu... also some Taiji places have the same rep as they cater to "ignorant" (my word here meaning unknowing) westerners who are after some holy grail of learning... often you can find just as good if not better training in your home country (depending on where you are... also you may find that by going to some local parks you might find someone to help you... what style/s do you do in paricular in Taiji...?? also do you have some experience with any of the arts you wish to learn...?? If so this might help you spot the "tourist teacher"..."

Is what I posted in response to a thread on MA...

Little bit of research, and I have a phone number and address for their boss, who I will call just as soon as I manage to buy some credit for my phone

"used tampon".....isn't that you? I'm big fan.

Interesting. The Language forums seem to have been taken down, and the whole thing is now behind a registration wall.

Yet... http://chinaonline.cn.com/ASK/forums/thread/1282.aspx is quite familiar. I'm not sure how I feel about having my alter-ego be named cross-eyed boy...

I've had this happen before with several of my websites. I've done what I can to lock them out but sometimes they just copy the page, change some colors and repost it.

I think it's hilarious that on their "China Business" forum, one of the topics listed is:

"How to protect IP?". They're not the best people to ask.

I gave them a call yesterday afternoon and got a fairly positive response, with a follow-up email saying

After we spoke I contacted our administrator, instructing him to turn off our Ask China language forums. Our administrator is now going through every post on Ask China (not only the language forum, but every single entry) to immediately delete suspect posts.

Apparently they were employing freelancers to generate content for the site, and the freelancers weren't so much generating it as borrowing it.

Very quick and correct response from their head guy once he was made aware of the issue, which to be honest I wasn't expecting - so credit to them for that.

And have also emailed them with a few more copied topics, but I'm damned if I'm going through the whole thing telling them what to delete. If anyone spots anything though post it in here and I'll pass it on. I think they thought it was only their language forum that was the problem, but there's copied stuff all over the place - and that's just what's been copied from here.

I've had this happen before with several of my websites. I've done what I can to lock them out but sometimes they just copy the page, change some colors and repost it.

It can be a real problem. This is the first time anyone's tried to pass forums content off as their own though. There are a couple of aggregator sites archiving damn near anything I haven't been able to do anything about, but at least they provide links back.

So what was my name?

Actually, someone copied and pasted in some of your posts, and then they banned you.

For those not up on what the heck is going on here, see

http://tinyurl.com/kdgda

as a WSJ reporter moonlights as an "original content" writer.

The whole forum seems down now.

And now it's up again, with copied content again. They really are taking the piss.

Example One

Example Two

Can anyone spot the deliberate mistake? Guess they thought making the English worse would let them get away with it. . .