dolphin-[censored].com legit?

MayImilae

Hey guys,

I registered an account to mention this...

I often check the Dolphin site (dolphin-emu.org), especially at the start of the month to see the monthly update article (by the way, no article this month makes me sad, lol).

Anyway, the first thing to appear in my browser (Chrome) was [censored]

I went to the site, and it is either an old version of Dolphin's website, or it is a direct ripoff. Showing latest build as 3.5-something. I wonder if someone is trying to rip off Dolphin, or if not (and it is the old site), why is the old site still up?

For some reason it automatically shows up as the first option in my browser when I type "dolphin". It is the second and third search result behind the real website for me when doing a Google search for "Dolphin emulator".

Anyway, in case no one was aware of this ripoff site, I thought I should let you folks know.

Cheers,

Nebulous

***MayImilae*** · 08-02-2016, 06:57 AM #2

Technically, both! It was Dolphin's official site from 2010-2012, but the person who ran it stopped responding and let the site rot while needed functionality failed. We moved to dolphin-emu.org on our own in 2012, and well, he just kept the site up to soak up easy ad money. So now it is a fake site that only exists for ad money. Thankfully in most regions the correct site has replaced the crappy old one at the top of the results!

BTW, for SEO reasons, we don't like people linking to that site (we really really want it to go away) so I'm removing your links and mentions of it. We don't want google having even more links toward it to rank it even higher!

08-02-2016, 07:02 AM #3

(08-02-2016, 06:57 AM)MaJoR Wrote: Technically, both! It was Dolphin's official site from 2010-2012, but the person who ran it stopped responding and let the site rot while needed functionality failed. We moved to dolphin-emu.org on our own in 2012, and well, he just kept the site up to soak up easy ad money. So now it is a fake site that only exists for ad money. Thankfully in most regions the correct site has replaced the crappy old one at the top of the results!

BTW, for SEO reasons, we don't like people linking to that site (we really really want it to go away) so I'm removing your links and mentions of it. We don't want google having even more links toward it to rank it even higher!

Fair enough, thanks. I didn't even think about the search results aspect of mentioning the name.

That is an unfortunate situation. Can you guys not send a cease and desist order or something? Or does the internet not really work like that? Lol. I've never registered a website or anything, so I'm not sure how the process even works. There has got to be some legal process you guys can go through.

**JosJuice** · (This post was last modified: 08-02-2016, 07:10 AM by JosJuice.)

(08-02-2016, 07:02 AM)Nebulous112 Wrote: That is an unfortunate situation. Can you guys not send a cease and desist order or something? Or does the internet not really work like that? Lol. I've never registered a website or anything, so I'm not sure how the process even works. There has got to be some legal process you guys can go through.

They're not doing anything illegal as far as I know. Dolphin's license lets anyone redistribute it. They're not doing something like claiming to be the development team either.

EDIT: Actually, on a second look, I can't find the source code anywhere on the website... Am I just missing where it is, or could they really be violating the license?

08-02-2016, 07:17 AM #5

(08-02-2016, 07:09 AM)JosJuice Wrote: They're not doing anything illegal as far as I know. Dolphin's license lets anyone redistribute it. They're not doing something like claiming to be the development team either.

EDIT: Actually, on a second look, I can't find the source code anywhere on the website... Am I just missing where it is, or could they really be violating the license?

I don't see it anywhere on the site. Unless it is bundled in with the main downloads. I don't really want to download from them to check.

Good! I hope they are violating the license so you folks can take them down! Justice served! :-)

Hopefully...lol.

TehGuy · 08-02-2016, 12:07 PM #6

(08-02-2016, 07:09 AM)JosJuice Wrote: They're not doing anything illegal as far as I know. Dolphin's license lets anyone redistribute it. They're not doing something like claiming to be the development team either.

EDIT: Actually, on a second look, I can't find the source code anywhere on the website... Am I just missing where it is, or could they really be violating the license?

The google code link that's posted gives another link (something like dolph.in/p/dolphinemulator or whatever) which leads to the main dolphin-emu.org site which you can get to the code from there. This is the only way I found to get anywhere close to the source code

**JosJuice** · 08-02-2016, 07:51 PM #7

(08-02-2016, 12:07 PM)TehGuy Wrote: The google code link that's posted gives another link (something like dolph.in/p/dolphinemulator or whatever) which leads to the main dolphin-emu.org site which you can get to the code from there. This is the only way I found to get anywhere close to the source code

I missed that link. Well, at least they tried... I'm not sure how strict the GPL is on where the source code is hosted, but getting them taken down on a technicality like that doesn't feel right to me.