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I empathise with the comments about copycats. I made a web game and initially put it up on github pages. It was inspired by a similar web game which had been a
by berjin 4y ago
I empathise with the comments about copycats.
I made a web game and initially put it up on github pages. It was inspired by a similar web game which had been abandoned and I wanted to add features etc so I re-created it from scratch.
Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies.
The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.
- teddyh 4y agoYou’re being purposefully vague. This is not a good thing if you want to convince people. All the things you refer to could be easily linked to, or referred to by name. You don’t even link to (or name) your own product, or the original abandoned web game. EDIT: I now see the link in your comment. If it was there originally and I missed it, then I apologize. Otherwise, thank you for adding a link to it!
- forrestthewoods 4y agoSounds like something a copycat would say!
- jansan 4y ago> You don’t even link to (or name) your own product GP actually put the link of his game into his comment. It is redactle-unlimited.com
- T-Winsnes 4y agoThis reminds me of the 90s when sites where hosted inside iframes to inject ads. ISPs were notorious for doing this. Every site started running javascript to break out of iframes because of it. I'm not sure if this would work for you, but something like this could help you if (window.location.hostname !== 'your host name') { window.location.replace('url on your website');
- _the_inflator 4y agoThanks for this reminder. You gotta love frames and the corresponding reloads.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- beardyw 4y agoSo you don't own red*ctle.com? It's a really good game, just the right level of difficulty.
- taink 4y agoFrom redactle-unlimited.com's About modal: About Redactle Unlimited was inspired by the original game at redactle.com which was inspired by Wordle. A random Wikipedia article is displayed with important words redacted (hence the original name Redactle). Redactle Unlimited has many useful features: multiplayer, smart guessing to match plurals and inflections (lemmatization), annotations and of course no daily game limit. So, GP's game is a more feature-rich version of the original sitting at redactle.com if I understood correctly.
- berjin 4y agoNobody has heard from the redactle.com dev for around a year now. The main difference with redactle unlimited is that the 1 game per day limit is removed and the multiplayer feature is a lot of fun if you're stuck. Just make sure you go to redactle-unlimited.com and NOT the one without the dash!
- yesseri 4y agoThe link is misspelled. It should be: redactle-unlimited.com
- Narann 4y agoOpen source emulation scene have similar problems. Some talented devs basically stop to work on open source emulator because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch)[1]. *[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/si2v5s/duckstation_now_officially_dead_github_repository/ https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/si2v5s/duckstati...
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago> because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch) Is it a copycat if it publicly discloses the original?
- Ensorceled 4y agoYes? Not sure what you are asking ...
- Spivak 4y agoI mean if you say you’re a fork it would seem like you’re not a copycat anymore but an independent project with a shared history.
- Ensorceled 4y agoI guess it depends on your feelings around the fork ... a project is more than just code; there are things like mind share and community.
- EMIRELADERO 4y agoGreat, but that has nothing to do with copycats. A copycat is a product that copies the original and pretends it is the original. You can't release software under an open source model and complain about "copycats" since that's literally what you gave permission for. As long as the licenses are followed, people have the right to do whatever they want with the code.
- 4y ago
- air7 4y agoX-Frame-Options: DENY Adding this HTTP header makes your site not work if embedded.
- berjin 4y agoThe embedding is more sophisticated than just an iframe or object tag. Generally they'll proxy the target site to their own origin and strip headers.
- Klonoar 4y agoCould you not do a domain check of some kind in the JS payload and just document.write the entire thing with a bigass notice if it's not on your blessed domain? You'd have to move the domain check in syntax and placement I guess, in an annoying game of cat and mouse... but it'd be something I suppose? Probably not worth it if it's not a large enough return.
- ilyt 4y agoGo read the article! That is trivial to remove via proxying, which author mentioned them doing. Really, anything you add to the page can be just removed that way. Only thing you can try is to somehow differentiate attacker traffic from normal users but with ubiquity of VPN providers good luck
- everybodyknows 4y ago> differentiate attacker traffic from normal users Many ways to do just that, suggested in recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952114
- sourcecodeplz 4y agoIn the old times people would just shoot you or before clubbed to the head and take your cow/wife/house etc. Yes, now we have some laws and all that but in reality: stealing is still rampant, just a different kind!?
- moffkalast 4y agoThe worst kind of stealing, the kind where you still have your property!
- berjin 4y agoThe property is not very useful if there is a phisherman standing outside the door stealing all the traffic.
- moffkalast 4y agoWell you know what they say, phish a man and you anger him for a day, teach a man to phish and he'll ask you for help with moving large sums of money out of his war-torn country of Nigeria.
- Spivak 4y agoThe very worst kind of stealing, the kind that robs you of a thing that isn’t yours to own but something you feel you deserve.
- spencerflem 4y agoC'mon, you know it's scummy. Obviously the person making the original deserves the audience and not the lazy look-alike.
- thecoppinger 4y agoI reflect on this often. There’s something to be said for the lost ways of retribution of old, and the evolution that came with it. If modern bankers and sycophantic politicians et al tried their modus operandi back in the era of tribes, I’m quite sure they were removed from the gene pool fairly quickly.
- terryf 4y agoSorry to be that guy, but this is exactly why lawyers and IP protection were invented. As a hacker, I hate that these are needed. As a member of society that tries to be considerate and respectful of others, this seems like a ridiculous and wateful overhead. However, as a realist with some experience in being brain-raped by a bigger company, unfortunately you need to protect yourself from the people that aren't nice or don't care.
- bmitc 4y agoHow are those useful when it is likely that the copycats are in a different country?
- terryf 4y agoIt's expensive but possible to enforce IP protection globally.
- idle_zealot 4y agoSo that doesn't really help with the stated goal of being "brain-raped" by a larger company then.
- marcinzm 4y agoYou send the request to Google and not the copy cat sites.
- prakhar897 4y agoI'm the owner of https://github.com/prakhar897/awesome-wordle https://github.com/prakhar897/awesome-wordle. You can mail me the details of your site and the competitor's site. I'll make sure to add a red flag against their sites to publicly condone this behaviour. I know this might not do much but it'll be a start.
- rojobuffalo 4y ago"condone" means accept, allow, approve. I think you intended the opposite.
- layer8 4y ago"condemn"
- prakhar897 4y agoAdded a comment.
- prakhar897 4y ago*Condemn instead of condone. I'm not able to edit the last comment.
- gjm11 4y agoI'd like to remark for anyone not already familiar with the game in question that ... * Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle * Redactle is (at least for those who like such things) a terrific game, and you should totally go to redactle-unlimited.com and take a look * as berjin says, the creator of original-Redactle hasn't been heard from in ages and shows every sign of having completely abandoned the game, so Redactle Unlimited isn't an unethical name-grab (It looks as if redactle-unlimited.com is #2 on Google and the main clone site is #1; on DuckDuckGo it's the other way around, so well done DDG.)
- gjm11 4y agoI see this got downvoted. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but I'm baffled as to what is supposed to be bad about the above, and if I've done something bad without knowing it I'd like to find out what. If whoever downvoted it happens to be around and willing to explain, your chances of making me not do whatever-you-didn't-like in the future are much better if you do so; your downvote unfortunately literally can't do that since I don't know what it's for. (Top hypotheses: 1. too much thread drift; 2. suspicion that I'm some sort of a shill for Redactle Unlimited; 3. actually it wasn't meant to be a downvote at all and it's just because the up/down arrows are easy to misclick on mobile devices. For what it's worth, it doesn't feel to me like an unreasonable amount of thread drift, I have no connection to RU other than enjoying playing it, and I entirely agree that the arrows are fiddly on mobile.)
- jlokier 4y agoI'll add a fourth guess for why. You know that "Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle" shows support for the author of this article, whose game is Redactle Unlimited. But to someone not paying close enough attention, it's easy to think original-Redactl is the author's game. Then that line can be misread as supporting the copycat over the author, which would be unkind in context. I misread it that way, until I scrolled back to check which one was the author's game.
- 4y ago
- systems_glitch 4y agoThis has put our open-source hardware efforts out of public development. It stopped when I'd posted a picture of one of our prototypes, and it was ripped off before I even got a final quote from a metals vendor. I feel like doing it behind closed doors results in many projects getting completed way slower. It still gets released as open source (and eventually ripped off anyway), but now there's no visibility into the process from the outside, which had been a big source of personal motivation in the past.
- mysterydip 4y agoI'm working on a webgame right now, so I appreciate the perspective. I was planning to open the source, but this changed my stance on that.
- pnt12 4y agoI learned about the game and I found it a neat challenge! Thanks for that.