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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Wow, the author is not exaggerating when saying it is a scam.

Looking at the .feedback page for Stack Overflow, it says at the top, in fairly large letters "We make Stack Overflow, where the world's developers get answers, share knowledge & find jobs they love. Also proud builders of the @stackexchange Q&A network."

Then at the absolute bottom, in small, washed out print it says "Disclaimer: This site is provided to facilitate free speech regarding Stack Overflow. No direct endorsement or association should be conferred."

So, users are not supposed to confer that a page claiming to be by the makers of stack overflow, are associated with SO? Beyond any reasonable doubt, the people behind that site are trying to scam visitors.

If the creators of the .feedback pages are also the TLD owners, it seems obvious to me that they should face legal charges and be stripped of the TLD.

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> So, users are not supposed to confer that a page claiming to be by the makers of stack overflow, are associated with SO?

Yes, pretty clearly trademark infringement IMO. Confusingly similar, their websites purport to be run by the very organizations they're trying to extort. The disclaimer is IMO not sufficiently clear.

SO is humorously classified as a "local business". NYC HN-ers, could you drop by the SO offices and ask a Python question for me? I keep getting these `ImportError`s...

I haven't done too much looking, but that seems fairly common so far. Microsoft is also a "local business", and Google is an ISP. I mean, Google Fiber is really cool, but that's not how most people use it

Google Fiber is a part of Alphabet, though...

Well, the reviews on stackoverflow.feedback are quite informative!

Dan Manny says:

Stack over flow made me loose money!!! Bad code with security wholes in it crashed my clients site!! Warning warning for scammers

and Antonio B. of Indonesia says:

Best site for solving programming issue!!!11!one! The most user and newbie friendly site!

11/10 would recommend

You know you can trust reviews like this!

I think "Stack Overflow Admin"'s response to Dan Manny should speak for itself:

> You fucking moron!!! You lost money because you were so stupid and not being able to differentiate bad code from good code. StackOverflow is not you free personal assistant. You should kill yourself for being so stupid.

From reading the "reviews" at http://www.stackoverflow.feedback/reviews, I get the feeling the entire .feedback TLD will soon be hosting all kinds of 4chan-alike pages and the owners will have to take the sites down because of the NSFW things that will be posted there...

Im pretty sure they're all from here though(including the one I quoted), and the ones before today are somewhat civil.

> !!!11!one!

Is there a word for the feeling you get when you see 15+ year old idiot message board / forum / usenet catchphrases apparently still going strong?

It's a curious mix of nostalgia and revulsion.

The German word for it is Beinaheleidenschaftsgegenstand, apparently.

In 22 years of living in germany, ive never once heard anyone use that atrocity of a word or anything close to it - I guess it's a joke-word from the tv series How I met your mother making fun of the fact that many complex german words are just glued together from other words, eg. Krankenhaus ("ill building" or "building for the ill"). This does not mean that every compound word you theoretically could form is actually a valid german word.

Yes, truly an old recycled joke that was never that funny in the first place, kind of like !!11!!!!one!

Here in the Anglosphere, any sufficiently compound word is indistinguishable from German. ;-)

Isn't that true? After 2 years in Germany, it was my feeling that you could freely associate several words into one. I'll defer to your 22 years of expertise, obviously.

You can combine words, but the result has to be a logical structure. The word by OP is nonsensical. It can't exist.

You totally can. Technically sometimes you need a certain conjugation or a linking "s", but usually you just combine the words.

I guess they meant that not every compound word is one that Germans actually use (as you would expect when somebody claims "it's a German word"). But you can totally make up words on the spot that every German will understand

Yep. Anything with more than one of "schaft", "stand", "gegen", "-biet", etc., is either a joke, or a government office.

Bietstandgegenwitgeschaft is real though

Googling that word returns only your comment.

I do use such constructs from time to time as a mix of nostalgia and tongue in cheek.

Everyone knows adults mix in cos(0) somewhere among the 1's

Really??!!!11-i^21?

I always mixed in lim x->0 sin(x)/x.

I agree!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!!!1onemilliononehundredeleventhousandonehundredelevenpointoneoneoneoneoneoneoneoneone!!!1

Having a quick look through I think most of the responses are just trolls.

Looks like all their pages have the word "scam" on them somewhere now. I also see some script alert() and other stuff that suggest they've got a lot of security bugs and people, either on here or elsewhere, have taken it upon themselves to inject/change a bunch of content so people realize it's all scammy.

It is a scam, but the reality is nobody will ever go to these domains, they will never be ranked in google or bing. So who cares. I could create a site called myfeedbacksite.com/google or google.myfeedbacksite.com.. same thing.

If you owned one of those sites, you'd probably be a bit concerned. You're probably wondering right now if it's worth it to take action, wait for another company to do so, or hope that it never gets traction, like you suggest.

Also, the domains you suggested are quite different from the current situation. A site like myfeedbacksite.com/google is clearly not owned or operated by Google. Very few people would be confused. Whereas a site named google.feedback is far more confusing. Not sure anyone would know if it's an official Google site or not.

You should only be concerned about people who know enough to tell that `google.com.feedba.ck` is probably not owned by google, but don't know enough to tell the same about `google.feedback`. I really don't think this covers a lot of people.

Two points: - I do think they are concerned about google.com.feedba.ck, those lawyers need to fill up their day. - google.com.feedba.ck is far more sketchy looking than google.feedback. It's far easier to fool someone with the latter, and therefore far more of a thread.

For now. Give it 5 years and everyone will know that something.random_tld is sketch too.

Actually, if you search in Google for site:.feedback you'll see about 45,700 pages of .feedback sites indexed in Google.

They are showing up for many brand searches.

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A.feedback&ie=utf-8&oe...

If someone puts up a site or page claiming to be a company or entity that they're not (i.e., "We make Stack Overflow, where the world's developers get answers...") then that's not a domain name or TLD issue.

It's another issue altogether that should be dealt with legally.

> Looking at the .feedback page for Stack Overflow, it says at the top, in fairly large letters "We make Stack Overflow, where the world's developers get answers, share knowledge & find jobs they love. Also proud builders of the @stackexchange Q&A network."

Plus it also looks decently designed and not like an easy to spot scam. I could easily see the average, non tech-savvy users fall for that.

Pretty much RipoffReport 2.0, except scaled to hyperbolic levels! Yay!!!!

well, technically anyone with a stackoverflow account can claim that.

Consumers will eventually learn, as they always do. Try to educate anyone you meet that brings up .feedback. If anyone on social media talks about it, link them this article.

You must be joking or have no experience beyond 1 or 2 people. The vast majority of the online population does not learn nor care about these details. The massive amount of scams that continue to exist and grow is evidence enough.

If people did something as simple as confirming the domain listed in the address bar is the site they should be on, we would see a major decrease in malware, but alas the situation continues.

The flipside of this is that if nobody visits .feedback domains, they won't be able to scam anyone. Users don't need to learn anything to avoid them, because they probably won't ever hear about them in the first place.

If they have no audience, they can be safely ignored. No reason to pay $600/yr for hypotheticals.

All I meant was, the moment someone brings up a .feedback domain or "Google's new feedback service," just let them know it's a scam and move on.

Let's hope they don't learn about this thing called "SEO"

I'm not sure how much that'll really help. It doesn't take too much imagination to think that perhaps Google's heuristics will rank this TLD poorly.

Trying to scam google over $600 feels like a poor strategy for a scam that depends on being discovered.

They aren't going to scam Google, or any legally capable entity.

I imagine they will follow the Yelp scam model - post bad reviews against smaller companies, out so them, and charge to remove the malicious information.

Scamming is a multi-million dollar sophisticated business. Scammers use various forms of advertisements from online advertisements to cold-calling potential victims to carry out their scams. That's how potential victims fall prey to scams and end up visiting malicious websites. That's how an audience for scamming is created.

The amount of education you spread (and assuming it's remembered and trusted) will never match the advertising and other underhanded methods scammers will use to trick people into visiting and believing this is a real site. They work on the scale of billions of online users.

If that were really true, the BBB might have gone under years ago, and the Nigerians might stop asking for help in transferring great wealth.

There is no shortage of suckers in the world - as the old saying goes, there's one born every minute.

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