Should Jellies be allowed to take questions off the internet and post them as their own?

No, other sites have scraped directly from our site, and we went all apeshit on them and stomped their faces into the curb.

Even if they give credit it’s pathetic.

Absolutely! Let someone use a question posted here on another site. When this first came to light, it was somewhat offensive, but then I took it as a compliment to Fluther. Let others use our questions. It doesn’t take away the quality of this site.

as long as proper credit is given to the original poster

Google does. As soon as we ask it, it’s right there on google.

I’m confused. Take questions off the internet, like, from a book or a tv show or something? Or off the internet, like they saw it on Tumblr?

Either way, sure. I don’t assume that every question people have had on here is totally original. There was a question a day or two ago that posed the exact question a president had. And if they’re taking stuff from here and posting it as their own, so what? It’s not like cheating in school, everyone knows there’s a chance you didn’t write that entire thing, or were heavily influenced, or… It’s the internet.

^ I always assume the askers who ask a kazillion questions, especially about things they neither understand nor know anything about, saw it on ask/yahoo/question ville. There’s nothing new under the sun anyway, and we are all influenced by something we’ve read or seen. I think the only true original questions are those asked in earnest about a specific situation; sure they’ve been asked before, but they are original for the asker, i.e., not “lifted.”

All the rest are plagiarism, in some form or another.

@zensky There’s nothing new under the sun anyway. Exactly.

You will never know for sure anyways. One of my recent questions, I just made up something completely absurd and random to be silly and another jelly showed me a very similar question was asked in complete sincerity on another site.

As with so many things… it depends. We don’t allow flat out plagiarism, but don’t mind if a question somewhere else inspires you to ask it here (as long as you link to the original). However, if it’s done in a self-promotional or spammy way, then it doesn’t pass muster. If you’re unsure, the best thing to do is flag it for us and give us a little note about possible plagiarism.

I don’t see anything wrong with it. In fact I would hope that some of the things we bring up here inspire people to carry on the discussion elsewhere.

To be or not to be, that is the question?

Allowed? I don’t think this site is about what’s allowed or not allowed. That’s kind of ridiculous. It’s just a q&a site.

Not my style personally but I say to each their own.

If the question is fluff, chances are it was inspired by something else on the Net. However I don’t believe many use it word for word and try to play it off as their own. Some might have just because they didn’t think of, or forgot to credit whom they got it from.

People get ideas for questions from the daily news in papers, on TV, in magazines or whatever. It’s the same as a question you might ask in a conversation because you learned something somewhere. If you quote anything here in the exact words used, you need to say where you got it. Otherwise, put it in other words of your own. (complete with misspellings and grammatical errors.)

Honestly, all the bullshit fluff questions are killing Fluther. The Quantacast rating is over 8K and it was was around 1K a year ago. That is traffic from search, the people that see ads. Something needs to be fixed and nuking the dumb questions is a good start. But that isn’t going to happen so enjoy the 404.

Isn’t 8K better than 1K, or did you mean 10K? And what do you mean by 404?