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Comment by berjin | Hacker News Reader

I empathise with the comments about copycats. I made a web game and initially put it up on github pages. It was inspired by a similar web game which had been abandoned and I wanted to add features etc so I re-created it from scratch.

Within a week it was cloned and put up on a nice domain with a different logo and the copycat was impersonating me on social media and ranking quite well on Google. It's no longer open source. The copy cat site now has adverts up and links to a network of copycat web games. Many copy cat sites are now embedding my site proxied (to avoid CORS) and surrounded with adverts. These sites rank really well on Google because the copy cat sites link to each other. The game is at https://redactle-unlimited.com if you want to check it out. I haven't made a life changing amount from donations but it actually might be a significant amount for people in poorer economies.

The bottom line is that you need to have a moat by having a trusted brand or database/codebase that can't be imitated.

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This reminds me of the 90s when sites where hosted inside iframes to inject ads. ISPs were notorious for doing this. Every site started running javascript to break out of iframes because of it. I'm not sure if this would work for you, but something like this could help you

if (window.location.hostname !== 'your host name') { window.location.replace('url on your website');

Thanks for this reminder. You gotta love frames and the corresponding reloads.

Open source emulation scene have similar problems. Some talented devs basically stop to work on open source emulator because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch)[1].

*[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/si2v5s/duckstati...

> because of highly successful copycat (here, RetroArch)

Is it a copycat if it publicly discloses the original?

Yes? Not sure what you are asking ...

I mean if you say you’re a fork it would seem like you’re not a copycat anymore but an independent project with a shared history.

I guess it depends on your feelings around the fork ... a project is more than just code; there are things like mind share and community.

Great, but that has nothing to do with copycats. A copycat is a product that copies the original and pretends it is the original.

You can't release software under an open source model and complain about "copycats" since that's literally what you gave permission for. As long as the licenses are followed, people have the right to do whatever they want with the code.

RA spats don't really focus on it being a copycat/multisystem "emulator combiner" from my experience (in fact, non-RA stuff with a similar goal like OpenEmu usually doesn't tend to be at the source for people quitting the emudev scene). It's typically problems with maintainer; he's a huge narcissist who pretty much thinks he's the kingmaker of the emulation scene.

With the sole exception of MAME and mGBAs conflicts with RA (which respectively are about having extremely old cores in RA & the fact that their PS3 port uses a dubiously legal homebrew SDK that uses components from Sonys own proprietary SDK), the overwhelming majority of spats tend to occur because the maintainer has a bad habit of throwing hissy fits over his personal opinions of emulation.

Specifically, the guy gets pissed whenever someone doesn't want to put in extra legwork to support libretro (which due to it being too overengineered is not an insignificant amount of work), gets angry whenever someone licenses out their emulator for a paid device (since RA can't legally be licensed out due to being a mess in terms of licenses) and so on and so forth. It tends to result in said emudev getting a cavalcade of angry IRC messages from the maintainer, backtalking in RetroArch IRC channels and public whining on the RA twitter account/blog (which due to their reach tends to result in users of RA with barely an understanding of the situation sending further angry messages to the emudev) and in at least one notable case, anonymously complaining about other emudevs on 4chan (but being so transparent about it that he was easily identifiable).

Just generally really immature stuff.

Yeah, interacting with this guy is not a pleasant experience. Manages to offend and be more offensive than even 4chan. It's sad because libretro is a pretty good idea and RetroArch has nice features like dynamic rate control and a shader stack.

It's a good idea, but the execution is utterly deficient.

RetroArch (the main libretro implementation as well as basically the reference implementation) is overengineered to the point of bordering on unusable. The entire project is riddled with bad design decisions for the sake of extreme modularity, but all this results in is that it's a pain in the neck to configure and customize. Remapping a button in an emulator, a relatively easy task for basically any emulator out there, can result in your entire setup breaking down and because your typical RA install has ~30k files and poor separation of configuration and application components, your only real recourse is to reinstall the entire thing.

Ironically, this specific deficiency also why most emulators nowadays have migrated over to using Stenzeks duckstation UI (which itself is based on Dolphins user interface, just better written); it turned out to be well written enough to be reusable across multiple emulators with fairly little modification, while also leaving developers the room to customize certain elements to fit their emulator (something which libretro is really bad at).

Libretro mostly got where it is because Twinaphex has enough orbiters to keep all the various cores up to date, even if it takes what amounts to a hostile fork to do so.

I completely agree. Funny that you mentioned button remapping, that's literally my number one problem with RetroArch since I first used it many years ago. The input mapping system is confusing and the RetroPad abstraction is redundant and unnecessary.

If it doesn't manage to autoconfigure the controller, you want to remap inputs or you're using a keyboard, you're in for some pain. The GUI doesn't show which actual physical button you're remapping core inputs to, only the RetroPad button. You have to keep in mind two levels of chained button mappings which is harder than it seems. If you remap the RetroPad itself you also remap the entire user interface inputs which leads to stupid situations where the GUI stops working and I have to edit the config file to undo whatever mistake I made that left the inputs in an inconsistent state such as two buttons mapped to the same key.

I actually argued with this guy on 4chan over this once many years ago. Why not have cores enumerate their inputs so that the frontend can map directly to them? SNES cores would return the symbols representing the buttons on the SNES pad. Something like this:

  core.inputs.digital = [↑ ↓ ← → A B X Y L R START SELECT]

We'd be able to map buttons and keys directly to those symbols just like every single standalone emulator out there without any of this RetroPad business getting in the way. He basically told me that the RetroPad is perfect, I'm retarded and if I'm autistic enough to want to use a keyboard to play games I deserve to be a second class citizen.

Oh, so that's the reason. I have a 6-button Saturn-style gamepad that I bought dirt cheap to play MAME. A year ago I wanted to play some Megadrive games. I tried RetroArch, and it's absolutely impossible to configure it, it insist that your controller has a SNES-like layout. What good is an emulator if it doesn't show you the real controls of the real machine? Also, I guess the interface is nice if you are playing on a RetroPi or similar connected to a TV, but on a PC with a real mouse is absolutely atrocious. And don't get me started on the million different cores and forks of forks of forks.

A few months ago I found Ares (https://ares-emu.net/), a fork of bsnes/higan with a pleasant UI and multi-system support, and I couldn't be happier. It is not perfect, but it is so much nicer.

Yeah, it's stupid. It's even more annoying with MAME and arcade games in general because every single system has its own button layout and every single game has its own button conventions. There is no such thing as a standard controller and of course trying to wrap such a diverse ecosyetem into an XInput controller abstraction results in a mess.

I always have to remap inputs for nearly every game because I want to have my jump, attack, dash buttons and all the other inputs remain consistent for every game due to muscle memory. The mere existence of the RetroPad makes this nightmarishly hard.

It's not like he doesn't know this. I remember him committing features that would let people swap A/B and X/Y buttons precisely to help the arcade players. Who knows what he's done since then. Maybe he fixed it but I wouldn't bet on it.

> And don't get me started on the million different cores and forks of forks of forks.

Yeah, even the emulator authors themselves are unhappy with that. I guess RetroArch needs those forks because their audience includes people with underpowered devices.

I'd like to remark for anyone not already familiar with the game in question that ...

* Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle

* Redactle is (at least for those who like such things) a terrific game, and you should totally go to redactle-unlimited.com and take a look

* as berjin says, the creator of original-Redactle hasn't been heard from in ages and shows every sign of having completely abandoned the game, so Redactle Unlimited isn't an unethical name-grab

(It looks as if redactle-unlimited.com is #2 on Google and the main clone site is #1; on DuckDuckGo it's the other way around, so well done DDG.)

I see this got downvoted. I vigorously endorse everyone's right to downvote things they think are bad, but I'm baffled as to what is supposed to be bad about the above, and if I've done something bad without knowing it I'd like to find out what. If whoever downvoted it happens to be around and willing to explain, your chances of making me not do whatever-you-didn't-like in the future are much better if you do so; your downvote unfortunately literally can't do that since I don't know what it's for.

(Top hypotheses: 1. too much thread drift; 2. suspicion that I'm some sort of a shill for Redactle Unlimited; 3. actually it wasn't meant to be a downvote at all and it's just because the up/down arrows are easy to misclick on mobile devices. For what it's worth, it doesn't feel to me like an unreasonable amount of thread drift, I have no connection to RU other than enjoying playing it, and I entirely agree that the arrows are fiddly on mobile.)

I'll add a fourth guess for why. You know that "Redactle Unlimited is a big improvement on original-Redactle" shows support for the author of this article, whose game is Redactle Unlimited.

But to someone not paying close enough attention, it's easy to think original-Redactl is the author's game. Then that line can be misread as supporting the copycat over the author, which would be unkind in context. I misread it that way, until I scrolled back to check which one was the author's game.

Ooooh, that's an interesting thought. You could be right.

So, for the avoidance of doubt:

The original original was redactle.com. The creator of that seems to have abandoned it not long after its creation, and to have taken no further interest in it.

The thing we are talking about is redactle-unlimited.com. This was made by berjin. It gives suitable credit to redactle.com. It provides a notably better playing experience than original redactle.com does. I do not consider it a copycat in any culpable sense.

And then there are the copycats of Redactle Unlimited, most notably redactleunlimited.com. That one, so far as I can tell, has simply taken berjin's code and filed off the serial numbers. It offers no improvement over redactle-unlimited.com. It does not give credit to any of its predecessors. It is definitely a copycat in every sense.

Redactle Unlimited (launched in July) looks like it launched about three months after Redactle (launched in April), and is using the name of the original one in its name.

I’m not sure what I feel about this if the original really is abandoned (is something ‘abandoned’ if it is working fine and just hasn’t been updated in eight months?) - but it definitely feels a little rich that the Redactle Unlimited author is complaining about copycats.

Well, there were people saying that Redactle seemed to have been abandoned in the Redactle subreddit before Redactle Unlimited was created. (I think.) In other words, although it's hard to know anyone's intent with confidence, it seems like when berjin made RU he had reason to believe that he wasn't stealing the thunder of someone who was still actively involved with Redactle. And Redactle Unlimited credited original-Redactle explicitly from its first creation, according to archive.org's Wayback Machine. So it's not trying to pretend to be "the real thing" in any sense in which something else is the real real thing.

All of which makes it seem ethically-OK to me.

It's also relevant that the point of Redactle Unlimited was to offer a feature original-Redactle didn't, namely the ability to play more than one game per day. By making Redactle Unlimited, berjin made Redactle players' lives a little bit better.

Whereas, e.g., redactleunlimited.com credits neither original-Redactle nor original-RedactleUnlimited whose code I believe it has copied, nor does it offer any usability improvements or extra features over original-RedactleUnlimited. In other words, it's purely parasitic -- it doesn't on net make anyone's life better other than that of the person who "made" it -- and it's playing a zero-sum game, gaining whatever success it does at the expense of something that went before it, whose identity it's trying to create confusion with.

I see where you're coming from but

1) When I say abandoned the original redactle.com has had it's problems. There have been several days where the original was down because the hosting bill was not paid. Some fans tracked down the hosting company and paid it. Also the certificate was expired for months. Some days it loads a disambiguation wiki page instead of a real article. The dev hasn't been seen on social media since April.

2) Everything I did in redactle-unlimited is from scratch and with significant improvements like multi-player and lemma. The copycats are actually using others' content by either pulling en eBaum's world and embedding the sites or in one case cloning the source code, replacing the logo and domain and claiming to be the "official redactle unlimited" on reddit.

3) I'm hardly the only person to have re-created a Wordle or web game from scratch.

Sorry to be that guy, but this is exactly why lawyers and IP protection were invented.

As a hacker, I hate that these are needed. As a member of society that tries to be considerate and respectful of others, this seems like a ridiculous and wateful overhead.

However, as a realist with some experience in being brain-raped by a bigger company, unfortunately you need to protect yourself from the people that aren't nice or don't care.

How are those useful when it is likely that the copycats are in a different country?

It's expensive but possible to enforce IP protection globally.

So that doesn't really help with the stated goal of being "brain-raped" by a larger company then.

You send the request to Google and not the copy cat sites.

This has put our open-source hardware efforts out of public development. It stopped when I'd posted a picture of one of our prototypes, and it was ripped off before I even got a final quote from a metals vendor.

I feel like doing it behind closed doors results in many projects getting completed way slower. It still gets released as open source (and eventually ripped off anyway), but now there's no visibility into the process from the outside, which had been a big source of personal motivation in the past.

I'm the owner of https://github.com/prakhar897/awesome-wordle.

You can mail me the details of your site and the competitor's site.

I'll make sure to add a red flag against their sites to publicly condone this behaviour. I know this might not do much but it'll be a start.

"condone" means accept, allow, approve. I think you intended the opposite.

"condemn"

Added a comment.

*Condemn instead of condone. I'm not able to edit the last comment.

In the old times people would just shoot you or before clubbed to the head and take your cow/wife/house etc.

Yes, now we have some laws and all that but in reality: stealing is still rampant, just a different kind!?

The worst kind of stealing, the kind where you still have your property!

The property is not very useful if there is a phisherman standing outside the door stealing all the traffic.

Well you know what they say, phish a man and you anger him for a day, teach a man to phish and he'll ask you for help with moving large sums of money out of his war-torn country of Nigeria.

The very worst kind of stealing, the kind that robs you of a thing that isn’t yours to own but something you feel you deserve.

C'mon, you know it's scummy. Obviously the person making the original deserves the audience and not the lazy look-alike.

I reflect on this often. There’s something to be said for the lost ways of retribution of old, and the evolution that came with it.

If modern bankers and sycophantic politicians et al tried their modus operandi back in the era of tribes, I’m quite sure they were removed from the gene pool fairly quickly.

It's worth reading the history here. Usually "your group" would steal from you and tell you it was some outside group. You go burn down and lynch a bunch of people who had nothing to do with it.

Often times this included moneylenders.. who were usually a religious minority. It usually involved their kids too.

What you describe was literally the cause of the revolutionary war in the US!

No, the British were actually taxing the Americans without representation and running kangaroo courts, though the tea ship the colonists attacked wasn't really all that involved.

I wrote my original comment at the midnight hour as I was falling asleep; I should have clarified that I meant more ancient than that, i.e. pre-agriculture, post-cave dwelling.

More along the lines of:

Jim has a bad habit of being a bit of a dick—harassing & bullying tribespeople, taking an unfair amount from the tribe—Jim gets removed from the gene pool next hunting trip. The quality of the tribe, present and future, improves.

I understand how this kind of thing doesn't track very well as a strategy overall in more complex & modern environments.

Lawlessness and retribution didn't stop the robber barons.

Right on — I should add that my shower thought wasn't suggesting we should go back, just an observation of the evolution of all things, in this case, justice and social order etc.

While some is gained and some is lost, I'm in the camp that the world is a better place now than it was then.

X-Frame-Options: DENY

Adding this HTTP header makes your site not work if embedded.

The embedding is more sophisticated than just an iframe or object tag. Generally they'll proxy the target site to their own origin and strip headers.

Could you not do a domain check of some kind in the JS payload and just document.write the entire thing with a bigass notice if it's not on your blessed domain?

You'd have to move the domain check in syntax and placement I guess, in an annoying game of cat and mouse... but it'd be something I suppose? Probably not worth it if it's not a large enough return.

Go read the article!

That is trivial to remove via proxying, which author mentioned them doing.

Really, anything you add to the page can be just removed that way. Only thing you can try is to somehow differentiate attacker traffic from normal users but with ubiquity of VPN providers good luck

> differentiate attacker traffic from normal users

Many ways to do just that, suggested in recent discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33952114

I'm working on a webgame right now, so I appreciate the perspective. I was planning to open the source, but this changed my stance on that.

I learned about the game and I found it a neat challenge! Thanks for that.

So you don't own red*ctle.com?

It's a really good game, just the right level of difficulty.

From redactle-unlimited.com's About modal:

    About

    Redactle Unlimited was inspired by the original game at redactle.com which was inspired by Wordle. A random Wikipedia article is displayed with important words redacted (hence the original name Redactle). Redactle Unlimited has many useful features: multiplayer, smart guessing to match plurals and inflections (lemmatization), annotations and of course no daily game limit.

So, GP's game is a more feature-rich version of the original sitting at redactle.com if I understood correctly.

Nobody has heard from the redactle.com dev for around a year now. The main difference with redactle unlimited is that the 1 game per day limit is removed and the multiplayer feature is a lot of fun if you're stuck. Just make sure you go to redactle-unlimited.com and NOT the one without the dash!

The link is misspelled. It should be: redactle-unlimited.com

You’re being purposefully vague. This is not a good thing if you want to convince people. All the things you refer to could be easily linked to, or referred to by name. You don’t even link to (or name) your own product, or the original abandoned web game.

EDIT: I now see the link in your comment. If it was there originally and I missed it, then I apologize. Otherwise, thank you for adding a link to it!

Sounds like something a copycat would say!

> You don’t even link to (or name) your own product

GP actually put the link of his game into his comment. It is

redactle-unlimited.com

Huh. Either they edited their comment after I wrote mine, or I missed it when reading, in which case I apologize.

I can't remember if I edited or not but I wrote the comment to share my experience rather to shill my project.

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