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I have come across a case where a comment section of a now deleted Aviation Stack Exchange answer is being published on a website not part of the Stack Exhchange community pool:

USHBY - interviews, talks - QNH, QNE & QFE, are they a dilemma, or a clear answer?

The site displays a following statements on it's About us page

Ushby is a non-profit organization focused internationally, with two primary goals, practicing Educational Journalism and providing career solutions to individuals around the world.

The organization lives economically off of donations such as Paypal, and materially off of the investment of our effort. When donations are received, they are used to pay the salaries of the staff. If unintended profit was found, it gets handled as corporate income, gets reported and paid with taxes.

Powered by Ushby Technical Team, Open Source, Linux and StackExchange.

Now: I'm not exactly an expert on the terms of service of Stack Exchange, but I find this situation at least a bit concerning.

The source of the discussion is not clearly mentioned, it is somewhat misleadingly published under "interviews, talks" tag on the USHBY website.

I suspect the users mentioned in the "interview/talk", Bianfable and DeltaLima are not aware the discussion is published outside ASE.

The publisher thus uses expertise provided by ASE members to it's own benefit, if not for straight up revenue generation, then for boosting it's image at least, to establish itself as a educational journalist.

I feel publishing this kind of material (if allowed by Stack Exchange terms of service), should be done with full transparency, providing a link to the source, and preferrably notifying the participants of the discussion by mentioning the citing and providing a link to it in the discussion

So: to those more versed in "terms and conditions", does this somewhat shady meet the standards of Stack Exchange?

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    $\begingroup$ Hello, someone linked this question from a chat room. You might find this answer over on the main Meta site helpful: A site (or scraper) is copying content from Stack Exchange. What should I do? Spoiler Alert: there's nothing to do. $\endgroup$
    – Ian Campbell
    Aug 22, 2022 at 20:42
  • $\begingroup$ Well, kinda figured this is not avoidable, and that there is pretty much nothing that can be done, but in this specific case the scraper turns out to be an active user of ASE. $\endgroup$
    – Jpe61
    Aug 23, 2022 at 8:15
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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for bringing this up, @Jpe61. It is a verbatim copy of the chat I had with them. It would have been nice if they mentioned their intention to publish it somewhere else, but legally I think they are in their right. The only thing that I really don't like is that they publish the name of my customer on there (they must have found that through LinkedIn, which is linked from my profile). It gives the impression that I represent my customer when I contribute here on stackexchange, which absolutely not the case. $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Aug 23, 2022 at 13:22
  • $\begingroup$ Their whole website seems to be GNU v3 licensed, which I don't think is compatible with CC BY-SA v4.0 $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Aug 23, 2022 at 13:22
  • $\begingroup$ Most of the ushby site is a bunch of mumbo jumbo, gpt-3 can do way better than the "journalism" published there... $\endgroup$
    – Jpe61
    Aug 23, 2022 at 14:20
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    $\begingroup$ @Jpe61 Thanks for bringing this to our attention. It's funny how they omitted the part, where they insulted me (now deleted comments in the chat room), which is where I decided to leave the chat and not to engage in any further discussion with this user. I think it's best to just ignore this. $\endgroup$
    – Bianfable
    Aug 23, 2022 at 17:06
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    $\begingroup$ The user previously stated on his/her profile that he/she "was assigned to ASE to help" or something along those lines. The knowledge, technical or any other kind, of ushby technical team has not been very impressive, I must say... $\endgroup$
    – Jpe61
    Aug 23, 2022 at 17:16
  • $\begingroup$ @Bianfable out of curiosity, did he come back to you and apologise like he said he would do? $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Aug 23, 2022 at 20:09
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    $\begingroup$ @DeltaLima Yes, he did (here), but only for being wrong, not for his behaviour :/ $\endgroup$
    – Bianfable
    Aug 23, 2022 at 20:15
  • $\begingroup$ @Bianfable that is a shame. He seems to be willing to learn, he recognises his mistakes and openly admits them. He does not delete his wrong answer, but keeps it - with a warning of it being wrong - so others can learn. These are all good traits. It's sad that his personal attacks on you and the non-apology basically nullify that. $\endgroup$
    – DeltaLima Mod
    Aug 23, 2022 at 22:47

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Thank you for bringing this up, @Jpe61.

The published "interview" is indeed a verbatim copy of the chat (at least the part of the exchange I had with him) on aviation.stackexchange.

It would have been nice if he mentioned his intention to publish our exchange on another website, but I think he is legally in his right as long as he abides with the license conditions of the Stack Exchange Network.

The only thing that I really didn't like is that they published the name of my customer on there (they must have found that through LinkedIn, which is linked from my profile). It gives the impression that I represent my customer when I contribute here on stackexchange, which absolutely not the case.

I have sent an email to the contact address mentioned on the website requesting the remove any references to my business contacts from their site. I received a reply and the webpage with the interview has now been removed, which was more than I asked for.

For me, that concludes this episode.

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