A request to all users caring about supporting developers

[neobrain]

Hello everyone,
First things first: Yes, I had to pick such a controversial topic name :p Anyway, serious stuff here.

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As many of you will know, there has been an ongoing conflict between our official homepage http://www.dolphin-emu.org and an unofficial homepage ran by a guy called mamario. For historical reasons, mamario's unofficial website has been going for a lot longer than dolphin-emu.org and thus currently still is at the very top of Google searches like "dolphin emulator" or "dolphin emu" while dolphin-emu.org shows up as the second or even third result¹. This obviously is a bad situation for us, since a ridiculous amount of people looking for Dolphin will go for the first Google result (completely ignoring the official homepage). That way, mamario is effectively stealing ad money from us which would help emulator development. Potentially more important, people run around with outdated builds (reporting invalid bugs), ask redundant questions because they only look at the joke of a FAQ that mamario's site provides, etc. Furthermore, this whole situation is wasting everyone's time by having to figure out potential solutions (hint: there is no good solution; and please don't let this thread run off-topic by discussing potential solutions).

I'd like to get people to stop linking to the unofficial homepage, that way Google might finally come to realize that it should put us on #1 of the search results. In particular youtube has LOTS of links to the unofficial site even despite our various attempts to fix this. I tried poking each of those videos myself, but they're just too many.

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For this very reason, I'd ask everyone to do a quick search on youtube for " shall not be named" and add a comment to any comment section to videos containing a link to that homepage. You can use my template for the comment:

Quote:@ <uploader_name>: Hey, could you please correct the link to the emulator homepage in the description? The link you provided points to an unofficial website which in no way supports the developers at all. Please use "dolphin - emu dot org" instead.

Of course, any poking outside of Youtube is well-appreciated as well. It does not matter how old the post/video/whatever is that you are trying to get correct, even stuff written in 2010 or earlier matters!


If you like, drop a reply to this thread so that we can see how people receive this thread and make sure report any "successful" requests so we get an overview of the success of this post!


¹ it might be different for some people depending on personalized search and the like, but for most people we are still on rank 2.

[DJBarry004]

You sure got an excellent idea, neobrain. It is time to something with that stupid outdated webpage.

[delroth]

Please do this.

[Anti-Ultimate]

I'm trying to spread it around on reddit as much as i can.

[haddockd]

I am super posting comments. I did around 25 or so. I may do some later as well

I was a little hesitant to place the comment on any videos that linked directly to warez or downloaded games. Let me know if you want me to post on those too but I avoided them to not sully the good name of Dolphin.

[MayImilae]

If you find a post that links to warez you can always report it to Youtube and make the video disappear. That's one way to get rid of links to mamario's site.

[ulao]

You mean to tell me that ***.dolphin-emu*****.com is not in any way part of this domain project? Even though the downloads share the same version number like ( 4.0 ) ? If that is the case then this is most certainly a deliberate act aimed at our work on this domain, correct? Just trying to get thing straight before I make efforts to fix this in any way I can.

[mbc07]

Has the dev team ever wondered taking him to the courts? Apparently he just added 4.0 release in his crappy site...

[MayImilae]

Ulao, the short version: Around 2010 the team decided that they were sick of trying to maintain a website so they gave it to some random guy called mamario who promised to run it in exchange for ad money. He then proceeded to disappear, letting builds break, not fixing things for months, and generally being totally a pain in the ass. So we left in Nov 2012. But since his site was so well established, it's been hard to get that top spot away from him. Meanwhile, he just keeps old broken builds up and soaks in whatever ad revenue he can. Jerk.

[ulao]

If what I said above is true, and looks like you just answered part of it and since he is linking to our code base ( look like its going to dolphin-emu's code project) then all he is doing is providing another link to the GPL code and making a fake site over it. This does not violate anything unfortunately. Unless I'm still missing something.

thx MaJoR. I remember that changing in domain. So he is playing the domain game and no we cant do crap about it except what the devs said.