Yes I'm talking about gamesas.com

It seems to use some sort of bot to copy entire threads from Bethesda Softworks Forums, attributes the posts to names culled from Facebook, and gets loads of hits which amount to advertising revenue for whoever is doing this.

My main issue as a gamer and TES fan is not so much that on occasion my posts made here appear unattributed to me on this other site, I'm not so bothered about that.

My main issue that when I use google to search for topics about TES games, I can't actually find a link that leads to these forums - all the links that should lead to discussions on gamesas Forums actually lead to a copy of a thread from here that has been copied on this imposter website, and gamesas dominates the first couple of pages of google searches - and that makes it really difficult to find the proper discussion and information about anything to do with TES games.

Surely there is a copyright issue with a 3rd party copying threads from the official forums of a software/gaming business, and google traffic being directed there instead of here. Is anything being done about this? Because it's driving me up the wall that any google searches do not direct me here, but to a copy of a thread with the comments unattributed to either gamesas Forums or the user who posted the comments. Surely this is illegal. It wouldn't be such an issue, except this fake site comes up in a google search within the first few results every time, whereas it's incredibly difficult if not impossible to find a google search link to a discussion on the official forums these days.

Yes, I concur! I hate it when the things I say on here appear as female avatars on the other site. Down with that crappy website and down with the monkeys who made it to begin with.

Why not just simply ignore it?

Because when I do a google search, it's coming up with half a page of results for gamesas, and nothing directing me to gamesas Forums. It's as if the official forums do not even exist any more, people googling with queries about the game are not going to be able to find this forum. Sure they will find copied threads and posts from it, but with no way to reply and no way to attribute posts to any particular poster, there is no way to register to this fake forum, because it is fake - it just copies threads from here and makes it look like a forum, but it's one without any discussion.

The main issue is that when I google (for example) "Morrowind LGNPC", being a fan of that MW mod, the first result returned by google is the official LGNPC website which is fine. The second is PES, which is fine. The third, fourth, and fifth results take you to copies of discussions here, but on this fake website, and gamesas Forums (which is where those threads were copied from) doesn't show up in even the first 3 pages - I couldn't be bothered to look any further, but I know on some occasions looking through google searches and finding this fake website had supplanted gamesas Forums in every instance over 10 or more pages of search results - it's actually nigh on impossible to end up on these forums as a result of a google search, and it's getting worse.

And it wouldn't be good for Bethesda's business to allow this to continue, when their traffic is being diverted elsewhere. I cannot ignore it because it is preventing me from finding genuine discussions on the official forum via google, and if Bethesda Softworks ignore it then.... well I just don't see how they can, for the sake of business, because this fake forum is basically redirecting Bethesda's business to their own dodgy ad-farm.