iLEMONed

Attentions have been drew since yesterday by the return of wordpress.com.cn. I also wrote about the issue at my Chinese blog. But friends from all over the world may not have an idea about what is going on. So here's the story:

WordPress.com.cn came out in late 2005 as a FAKE official Chinese version of wordpress.com. The domain was registered in China by a Chinese and its server was located in Beijing. A couple weeks after they opened registration to the public, they deleted many user accounts without notices, which led to a large number of users criticising not only wordpress.com.cn but also wordpress.com. Matt then quickly responded that wordpress.com.cn was an imitation in no way associated with wordpress.com. The site then faded away silently.

Yesterday I received a spam e-mail sent from wordpress.com.cn, in the mail I was told that testers were wanted. I then followed the link and registered an account. No sooner had I logged into the admin center than I noticed that they had removed every backlink to the official WordPress sites there! Even worse, in all of their 330 available templates including some very famous ones, I could not spot a single credit link back to the theme authors!

Wicked and self-deceiving enough, huh? I don't want to believe that all these evil behavior, this fraud, was from a Chinese, my compatriot. WHAT A SHAME.

At last let's see some timestream of this FAKE SITE:

• 2005-12-07: Fake site launched, and was rapidly spread out.
• 2005-12-08: Fake site opened user registration.
• 2005-12-22: Fake site deleted many user accounts without notices.
• 2005-12-23: Matt debunked the fake site.
• 2005-12-27: Users discovered that DoNews might be the guys behind the fake site.
• 2006-01-19: DoNews started providing WordPress-based blog service which was apparently done by the same guy from the fake site.
• 2007-10-23: Fake site spammed a ton of maiboxes and returned.