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I asked a question about an issue with Cisco Webex desktop application.

Issue with Cisco Webex

When I was doing further research I found that within a short amount of time the question had been copied here:

https://www.onooks.com/issue-with-cisco-webex/

What's going on?

I can't find any reference to 'onooks' on superuser.

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  • 3
    It has absolutely no connection to Super User. Your question was scrapped by a random website
    – Ramhound
    Commented Apr 7, 2020 at 22:49
  • 4
    @Ramhound No so. See meta.stackexchange.com/a/200178/267099
    – DavidPostill Mod
    Commented Apr 7, 2020 at 22:58
  • 1
    Mine question was SCRAPED by Onooks in only a minute after I've asked it...
    – FZs
    Commented Apr 14, 2020 at 20:24
  • Wow that scraper is really bad, t onlhey copied the question, no answers, in a wordpress post, with the tags mapped to the description
    – Magnetic_dud
    Commented Apr 19, 2020 at 10:55

2 Answers 2

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What is a "scraper" and why is that bad?

Historically, SCRAPER here on Stack Exchange meant "Stack Content Republishers Attributing Poorly and/or Excelling at Ranking." More generally, a scraper is another website which copies content from our sites either by scraping directly from our pages, accessing the information through our API, or some other means. In principle, there's actually nothing wrong with doing this. Our content is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 and is freely redistribituble, so long as they follow the attribution requirements and link back to us as the source. Some sites, however, do not follow these rules or bring up other concerns in the process.

...

How do I go about reporting these sites?

Please contact us directly using the on-site form. Select the "Stack Exchange content is being reproduced without attribution" option from the drop-down, and provide as much information as possible. Even if you are reporting an entire site that is scraping many questions, please provide an example of a question on their site and the corresponding question on our site, as well as any Google search terms you used that led you to finding this site. Any other information you might have can be included in the free-form text box.

Source A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What should I do? - Meta Stack Exchange

onooks.com has been scraping SuperUser and many other SE sites without attribution. I have reported it to SE via the contact us link

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Take any SE question, google the title in quotes, and see the plethora of scrapers out there. For example my highest scoring question was

https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/45958/how-do-i-open-a-master-link-in-a-chain

which shows up 12 times, frequently translated too. Here's an example in Korean https://qastack.kr/bicycles/45958/how-do-i-open-a-master-link-in-a-chain and this outfit seems to do Russian, German, French, Thai, Chinese, Indonesian, etc. And again, no attribution except leaving user-profile links in place.

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