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One thing I've never got to the bottom of is: do the vacuum'd in documents (link the links added to HN submissions) get stored/archived and made accessible on Scribd?

That's never felt a very comfortable thing to me; though I admit my main awkwardness is in how it is automatically appended here.

View on HN

All documents uploaded to Scribd (either automatically or manually) are stored in S3 and are available on Scribd until the document is deleted from Scribd. If you find your content was uploaded to Scribd without your permission, you should contact our support team; they'll take care of it for you.

Does it appear in document lists? Or is knowing the URL the only way in?

The "ethical" concern I have is that it encourages behaviour like that shown on hn - with the scrape link added automatically. There is a distinct difference there compared to people uploading documents themselves (IMO anyway).

Of course if it's stored but not indexed that feels fine.

(thanks for clarifying)

HN is using the "slurp" API we make available at scribd.com/developers. Documents uploaded via the slurping system are marked as private and uploaded to a fixed "slurp" account for which no one (outside of Scribd) has the password.

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