Last month, I wrote an article about my recent experience creating a hobby project in a web framework - Ruby on Rails - that hasn’t been “in fashion” for some time. The blog post gathered some interest and made it to various discussion sites like Hacker News and others. It caused a pretty big spike in traffic and my post got linked from some more places and generated some interesting conversations. I had fun, talked to some new users of my app (a simple, no-strings-attached free tool to organise bands), got to geek out for a few evenings and all was good. Then a few days afterwards I noticed some odd behaviour in my web logs and monitoring: I started getting a lot of bot/crawler activity, but unlike the usual Wordpress-vulnerability scraping, this was activity specifically targetting the public “About this site”, FAQ and Help pages, as well as probing for non-existent pricing and subscription URLs.

Lobsters is a community-driven platform for sharing and discussing links to articles, tutorials, and projects related to technology and programming. Readers can learn about a wide range of topics, from software development and system administration to cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. With user submissions, comments, and voting, Lobsters provides a platform for collaborative learning and knowledge sharing among technology enthusiasts.

Lobsters

After a Ruby on Rails hobby project gained traction on Hacker News, the author discovered multiple near-identical clones of their app appearing within days, complete with AI-generated testimonials, stolen screenshots, and placeholder content. Investigating further, they found this pattern is widespread across niche communities — AI tooling has dramatically lowered the barrier for drive-by cloning operations that scrape sites, replicate functionality, and spam social media with sock puppet accounts. The author reflects on the difficulty of combating this trend and laments what it means for indie creators and the open web.

Sloppy Copies