Why are our posts from Yahoo Answers ending up on other sites; please see below?

Paperback YOUR name, my name and those of dozens of others here I've discovered on DOZENS of different web sites.

I've been able to write to a few to get my name off..but others I can't find an administrator to complain to..and I never got a response from Yahoo when I wrote to ask them if they sell these to other sites.

edit: this is from one of my google searches..it makes it appear I have an account there. I have only written this site to tell them to remove this

User statistics for: mama_pajama_1User statistics for: mama_pajama_1. ... General Statistics - mama_pajama_1. Total Time Spent Online: 0 minutes. Total Posts: 1 posts ...

www.the-family-relationships-bulletin.info/profile/?u=1669;sa=statPanel - 24k - Cached - Similar pages

I did not create a user profile at www.the-family-relationships-bulletin.info/ web site. They took a Yahoo answer and created one FOR me as did a dozen other sites in the past year

Some of these sites make it appear as if we have an account with them..and clicking on our Yahoo screen name copied there goes to a bogus "profile". I'm serious.

I've discovered my answers highlighted on sites about animals, parenting, Judaism and oddly on a half dozen different Christian missionary sites and sometimes on those..there are other additional answers or comments that did not appear here.

Google your Yahoo screen name and you might be surprised just how often they show up on other sites.

I first discovered this last year and since then it's multiplied.

several of my answers on Kabbalah are on this site http://b600.org/kabbalah/ that I've been unable to get my screen name removed

and ironically that b600 site has pages about Intellectual Property!http://b600.org/intellectual-property/ that are ON some of the pages where MY copyrighted words on one essay are RIPPED off

do you see this page>>http://74.125.93.104/search?q=cache:kZWop-RezKgJ:b...

I have that copyrighted and it shows it..right there..yet they have posted it without my permission and make it appear that I answered there

Here a site makes it appear I asked a question there, when the question was asked in Israel travel..and they sign it with the name of "Landon" that has no meaning to me..I see they give randon names below each of the ripped off q's.

http://wild-animalphotography.com/

http://wild-animalphotography.com/wildlife/where-w...

this one I would like to get removed from that site

edit: Mike S, the past 2 days all my contact q notification emails have been telling me only ? a contact has asked a question..for EVERY contact who is asking a question! I don't know who is asking unless I click on the link in the email. I don't like that if it's a new change .

ASTONISHED EDIT: Wow an actual response from Yahoo.

Thank YOU Paperback..I hope they will investigate all those other sites, too.

What I want to know is WHY it took this question to 'bring it to their attention" when I have written directly to Yahoo twice about this in the past. I sent a list of more than a dozen sites when I first noticed this problem more than a year ago in a Yahoo Answers form link that's on an answer page. And the second notification I sent was an email to cc-advoc@yahoo-inc.com a few months later, too.

I never received any reply whatsoever.

Surely, we haven't been the only people to notice this and complain about it?

It took a Jew with a view to get something done eh? LOL

thanks again! I hope our names and answers will soon be disappearing from all those sites that have hijacked our stuff!

I've noticed that too.

I don't know if yahoo is deliberately providing any information, but it wouldn't necessarily need this to happen.

Any programmer could write an application to 'scrape' websites, extracting information. The cleverer the program, the more accurate the scrape.

Hence a site about widgets could use such a program to scrape other widget sites, extracting the information in a usable form and reformatting it for their own site.

It makes sense that Y!A would be a target for this; it's a big site with a high content level, all in the same format. That means the scraper has to cope with only this one format, and can easily make use of keyword searches.

While this may be far from legal, it's also hard to stop. It would mean jumping on each and every site that does this. It's a bit like spam - it would probably take some high-profile prosecutions and immense penalties to deter people from doing it. Even then they'll probably just use servers in 'dodgy' countries to get round that.

I think it's something we'll just have to get used to. We shouldn't be putting any sensitive information on Y!A anyway, and make sure your screen name doesn't identify the real you.

This is a serious question and I would like it addressed!!! Several months ago I googled my screen name and found several of my answers posted on various different websites. Most of these websites had my screen name associated with the post, but some did not. What's more disturbing is that some of these websites required a password to log into or change a posting. When I requested 'forgot my password' and entered my e-mail address I never received a reply.

There are two things about this that really vex me;

1) Someone taking credit for my work and research. This is known as plagiarism. For those of you who are foggy on that issue it's the same as stealing. It shows a lack of integrity. In academia or the business world can get you in serious trouble.

If someone asks a thoughtful question that prompts me to think a little bit, I don't consider that a bad thing. I frequently site the sources so if someone wants to verify my information, they may do so. This is just good practice in case you ever want to write something that is ever going to be peer reviewed. Even if you don't use a direct quote from the source, it allows the reader to better understand your train of thought.

2) I post on other places besides YA in addition to writing an occasional blog. I DO NOT want someone cutting an pasting my answers and taking them out of context! Not only is this plagiarism (as mentioned above), it can impugn your reputation as a participant on YA or elsewhere.

Thank you for pointing this out. I enjoy this forum. Unfortunately there is very little I can do about individual posters who cut and paste my answers. However considering the number and extent of posting I have found, obviously there is something up. I sincerely hope the powers that be at YA can clarify why this is happening.

Wow, that's disturbing. Thanks for bringing this to light, and providing such an excellent illustration of the practice. I imagine that all the content we provide here is subject to Yahoo's usage via some TOS clause or other, but it still doesn't seem right; the answers I give are in direct response to the applicable question, and shouldn't be re-posted where the context may change.

Starred for my Contacts.

Edit: I did as Mama Pajama suggested, and searched for my user name. Thankfully, I only got mentioned twice by non-Yahoo! sites; the first wasn't even a Q&A of my own, but of another user who addressed me by name in their post, the second, embarrassingly, was an answer I gave to a joke question that I would rather have stayed dead and forgotten. Alas, nothing ever dies on the internet, and the "Large Penis Support Group" and I (or at least this account) will be forever linked. There goes any chance I ever had of running for elective office.

Second Edit: Wow, you actually got a response from Yahoo. You're even more impressive than I previously thought. Hope you enjoy Passover, Paperback.

Mama Pajama is correct. After someone told me they could Google all my questions and answers, even if I don't allow fans, I went and tried it.

At least 50 percent of the links to my profile name went somewhere completely unrelated. This has been happening for a long time... at least a year.

Now, having our Q&A show up in search engines isn't new, that is what Answers has always been for from the beginning, to create a Q&A database that brings queries to the Yahoo site.

The Updates message is about the little blurbs we get in our email now... the ones that say "so and so has connected to so and so" that kind of thing...

Most if not all content on YA or other such sites becomes public domain and may be re-posted/reused without the express permission of the individual posting such info so long as nobody is SELLING the answers/questions. Of course Yahoo has to make $$$ somehow beyond advertising revenue and click generated revenue so I wouldn't put it past them to be selling our posts to others without our knowledge which is supposedly illegal. It's a bit like going to Kinko's copying pages from copyrighted material...bundling it up and selling it on Ebay which folks do all the time now. It's supposedly illegal, but who's going to stop it?

Woow- tried out the suggetsion and found answers of mine pasted across the web- everything from tailoring sites to recipe sites to beng quoted on various blogs!

If Yahoo is selling this content on- then there is an issue. If it is just people pulling into various sites (as seems the case in some sites trying to pass themselves off as Q&A sites)- not much we can do unless Yahoo decides to enforce copyright compliance

I have many suggestions. Here are a few: 1. Improve the rating system/go back to the old system (w/ points) and optimize it. There's too much abuse now. Plus, people aren't spending any time in discovery mode. 2. Encourage more voting and optimize the system - Promo week on voting (e.g. double the pts, double the quotas) - More pts for voting for tiebreakers...and make it easy to find them - Randomize the answers in voting (to eliminate bias towards 1st answer which is not necessarily the best answer) - Encourage more people to choose a best answer...and encourage this via point bonuses. 3. Reduce abuse - Make the Community Guidelines guidelines obvious. Maybe a fun quiz that people get points for passing - Actually take care of abuse more quickly

To be honest I think you might have a clone, I've had this too on other sites. that's why I change my Avatar and name slightly now again, not that it makes much difference. I came across my old user name on a poker site and a few others, they were obviously from R&S as they were talking and arguing about it in the posts on that site alone. Which is not me, I came across this by chance just typing my user name in google.

I think MAMA_PAJAMA is right!.

Mike S;

All my The notification emails are giving my contacts name as '?', and has been doing that for several days.

Oh wow, you have brought this to yahoos staff attention Paperback. And a REAL Person answered :)

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Edit;

Yahoo Could we respectfully as for our old avatars back and 360's on our profiles it would be much appreciated by many of our regular users :)

Is that one of your questions? I wonder how much ad revenue they are taking in for using someone's Y!A post. Hah! Here I am posting a question on Y!A for free and some hacker pastes it on to his website to lure in customers and charges advertisers to post their ads on his site. If they use my questions, what percentage of the ad revenue am I entitled to?

I am sure if I posted a link to an ad on this sight, it would be pulled for a copy right violation. And yet, obviously there doesn't seem to be any proprietary rights for Y!A members, and their own questions and answers. How hypocritical.