"Cloning" an SMF forum... is that possible? (weird question)

[Paracelsus]

This is kind of a weird question that I couldn't fit in another section.

My forum is the one on my signature and running since 2007 with SMF. Yesterday looking at referral analysis I got into a domain which has a recent SMF installation... nothing weird so far, however I noticed that some of the usernames were quite familiar to me. Got deeper into it and found that even I, myself), have a username there with my avatar and some posts in it (that of course I've never written)... ... the same with some of the members in our community that I can swear never registered or posted there. Even some (very few) of the topics or sections are similar to ours!

The url is this: http://hiphoptuga.createaforum.com

Where did all this come from I have no ideia, can anybody give me any lights on this subject? How is this possible?

[JohnS]

If you wanted to it would not be impossible to trawl existing SMF forums (and others) and pull out the users and posts and repost them in your own forum.
I can't really see the purpose in this other than to try and make your own forum appear more popular than it really is.

[Paracelsus]

If you wanted to it would not be impossible to trawl existing SMF forums (and others) and pull out the users and posts and repost them in your own forum.
I can't really see the purpose in this other than to try and make your own forum appear more popular than it really is.

Perhaps that's the goal I don't know, but I've already reported to createaforum.com asking them to do something about it, it's kind of creepy to see that.

[Antechinus]

Anything you can see on a web page is only visible because it has already been downloaded to your browser. Yes, you can write scripts to scrape content from just about any web page. It has been done. For instance, a while back when the Richard Dawkins site shut down their forum, there was concern that all the content would be lost (they were talking about trashing it at the time). They later decided to keep the old forum as a locked archive, but before that decision was made a lot of people were worried. A bloke I know wrote a script that scraped the content from the entire forum, including all the topic, board and post urls so it could be re-used later.