As soon I have heard about one gaming news website instantly scraping content from Sirus Gaming, that immediately had me check and investigate. Gaming Ideology, a gaming news outlet from Iceland according to its Whois details, is notoriously scraping content from fellow journalists in the video games industry from sites such as Siliconera and WCCFTech.
I have officially reached out to them about what their staff is currently doing, but apparently, the site’s official e-mail is not active as I just received a bounce-back e-mail.
Scraping, stealing, and even plagiarizing content are common in the media and blogging landscape but not at this level wherein every bit of news content is stolen and re-published to a site without asking permission.
Gaming Ideology may have a tool or a plug-in that acts as a scraper, adding lists of websites to target and placing a rule that only takes content from a specific category or tag. By understanding the website’s malicious actions, only news articles from other websites (including Sirus Gaming) are actively being re-published on their sites.
That narrows it down to a specific type of program or WordPress plugin (as they use one of the most popular content management systems) with that specific feature. Or someone from their editorial staff is purposely doing this.
As a test, this news article about them may or may not be re-published because if the latter happens then that means they have a staff actively doing copy-pasting content.
