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Unauthorized clones of AT (AnonTalk.com)

As you may or may not know, depending on your life experiences and/or age, there are some really evil people out there; true scum of the Earth. Unfortunately, this Web site has been and seems to continue to be the target of many of these psychopaths. One of the countless things that they do to destroy this place is to make unauthorized, illegal clones of it.

This Web site is not based code-wise, idea-wise, design-wise or anything-wise on any previous software. It is closed source and cannot be licensed in any way. It is not for distribution. It is designed to be unique. However, people with no ideas of their own like to blatantly steal others', and in the case of AT, somebody has made a more or less exact clone (to the untrained eye, at least) of this Web site and released it as "open source" against my explicit wish. This was done purely in order to ruin this project and wash out its trademarks, and as you hopefully understand, this is NOT appreciated. Especially not when the person claims full credits and accuse me of being the thief (probably without even believing it himself -- if he does, he truly has some mental illness). This domain was created in early 2008 and many people have seen the site develop slowly but steadily. The most successful clone was made after it reached one of the last major milestones and not much has changed on the surface since. Thus, the clones and this Web site look identical to most people.

Links or addresses will not be provided to the clones for obvious reasons. Do not ask about them or try to find out about them here as this will be considered trolling. Since they are constantly spammed here, however, it shouldn't be long before you find out about one of them. When you do, please report it to their Internet service provider, domain registrar, DNS host and any affiliates, such as PayPal, Google AdSense, etc. If you do, you greatly help out. I really don't have time for this bullshit with so much work to do, and the companies rarely listen to me. You may very well have better luck. Doing this and successfully getting rid of an AT clone is, at the time of writing, worth almost as much to me as donating a larger amount of money. It will encourage me to continue working hard on the board, which is less so the case when I see people stealing my hard work.

If you want to help me out, please do the following (or use any method that is better/faster that you know about):

  1. Go to: http://cqcounter.com/whois/ and enter the offending URL/domain.
  2. Now you see which company is hosting it currently (and the domain registrar and DNS provider). Search for the ISP's name in a search engine to get to their Web site (it's typically hard to guess). Alternatively, you may simply use the "abuse" e-mail address listed for the IP address owner. Don't just assume that they use [email protected], although this is very common.
  3. On the company web site, search for links such as "contact us", "report abuse", "copyright/trademark infringement", "legal", "support" or anything else that looks relevant. Extract all e-mail addresses (put all but the primary one in the Bcc field). Or just send to the most fit address. It's up to you.
  4. Send an honest e-mail to them where you explain that you are a user of AT, letting them know what has happened and that you are helping me out with permission. Show them http://www.anontalk.com/copyright to prove that you have permission to represent AT. Be sure to mention that they have cloned the entire Web site concept, exact CSS/JavaScript files, line-by-line HTML, meta data, exact terms, colours, layout, entire texts, features, etc. Also don't forget to mention how they have been spamming their URLs all over AT, bypassing filters and generally harassing us for a long time (which is more or less true for each of the clones).

Thank you very much if you do this. It's all about numbers, so your efforts matter. It's not that much work for you as an individual, but if many of you do it, they probably can't keep ignoring the thieves that they provide a service for.

I'm not encouraging any illegal activities, but if we continue to be ignored by these companies when we do things by the book, I would say that you have the moral right to take down the clones by any means necessary.