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Take a look at the site (Hat tip to cwrea for finding it!):

It sure has a lot of similarities to SO!

But it seems to use Python:

And it doesn't use OpenID directly for signin:

Instead, Weddingnuts uses RPX to interface with OpenID and other auth systems:

Then again, DocType is in the League of Justice... so who knows.

What do you think: is Weddingnuts.com a SE site or an SO clone? Or something else entirely?

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11 Answers 11

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Clone.

Searching for a tag ([venues]) does not show the same tags page that SO does.

It appears to be built with the same engine as our dear old friend CNProg.com.

The logo for Wedding Nuts is at /content/images/logo2.png. Guess what is at /content/images/logo1.png?

Edit: This use to be the CNProg logo. I will still leave the tag here just in case it decides to come online...

http://weddingnuts.com/content/images/logo1.png

Edit: Turns out debug mode has been turned off, so all of this does not really apply any more

I know any website can have 'fancy' URLs, but the URLs Wedding Nuts uses do seem very Django-y, especially consider CNProg.com is written with Django.

A quick search finds that GearCult is hosted on the same server has Wedding Nuts (and Google Wavez). Whoever is running these sites really has a thing for duplicating other popular websites in Django. You can confirm that it runs Django by making it 404. By the looks of the urls.py, it doesnt look like whoever made these sites is a very good programmer!

Edit: Turns out debug mode has been turned off, so all of this does not really apply any more

Interestingly enough, both WickedAwesomeWallpapers and Gearcult are being run in debug mode. This means if you 404, you will be presented with a list of all the valid urls, as regex.

You can also take advantage of the wonderful Django tracebacks to take a look at small snippits of his code and server settings by forcing an error. Try this one:

/var/www/django/wickedwall/forum/views.py in render:

def render(request, slug="", hue=0, saturation=0, lightness=0):

   if hue != 0:
      hue = int(hue)

   wallpaper = Wallpaper.objects.get(slug = slug)

   return render_to_response('render.html', {
        "wallpaper" : wallpaper,
        "hue" : hue,
        "saturation" : saturation,
        "lightness" : lightness,

Using these, you can confirm that both WickedAwesomeWallpapers and Gearcult are owned/ran by 'robstar'. Just take a look at the 'ADMINS' setting from their settings.py:

ADMINS  (('Rob', '[email protected]'),)

Then a quick look on his twitter page reveals this robstar fellow is the 'mastermind' behind Wedding Nuts and Google WaveZ.

Interestingly enough, it does not look like CNProg and these sites are run by the same person. A simple domain whois on CNProg.com shows that the domain belongs to "Chen Gang". A whois on weddingnuts.com is pointless because it was registered through a proxy

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34

Heh, in their question page's javascript, my name appears in a comment (in code I wrote a long time ago):

// {"Id":6,"PostId":38589,"CreationDate":"an hour ago","Text":"hello there!","UserDisplayName":"Jarrod Dixon","UserUrl":"/users/3/jarrod-dixon","DeleteUrl":null}
var renderComment = function(jDiv, json) {

That's before we minified our js and before we did a major refactoring on question/answer comments (in part to facilitate comment votes, in part because I was on something when I wrote it).

At first, I was angry, but then I went and downloaded some copyrighted music. THE CIRCLE OF THEFT GOES ROUND AND ROUND!

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  • 12
    copies this answer into a code comment
    – Shog9
    Sep 6, 2009 at 4:18
  • 4
    @Isaac Waller - it's a downside, but also an upside - you can see how any site does a cool feature.
    – Jarrod Dixon
    Sep 6, 2009 at 4:29
  • they paid the price
    – Jeff Atwood
    Feb 16, 2014 at 7:50
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Interesting just how much of the copy (as in text content) is taken directly from SO. Check out the Faq page to see what I mean. It's almost word for word.

It's also easily the closest functional clone I've seen. Whoever built is has spent a significant amount of time at SO. I'd give good odds it's a 10K user (with this much attention to detail, they want to clone the mod tools, too). Anyone gonna step forward and claim it?

Update
Looks like it runs cahoots (note the heart shaped favorites image in this screen shot).

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  • Yah but if they copied the actual text, it stops being a clone and becomes a copyright violation. I wonder if they also copied the css outright as well...
    – kanamekun
    Sep 5, 2009 at 0:30
  • Nah, screenshots are different and it's in PHP. I doubt someone would host PHP behind a Python server. Anybody can use a heart shaped gif (he might even have stolen from cahoots)
    – Vinko Vrsalovic StaffMod
    Sep 5, 2009 at 1:29
  • Interesting yes, and it's the text content that led me to the sites. I was actually trying to see if any of the Stack Exchange sites had been indexed by Google yet, figuring that ppl might not have changed some of the stock text!
    – Chris W. Rea
    Sep 5, 2009 at 1:37
  • 1
    Of course I might've been naive in assuming that any of the real Stack Exchange sites are allowing themselves to be indexed yet ;-)
    – Chris W. Rea
    Sep 5, 2009 at 1:37
  • Whois says GoDaddy anon wiper, so that makes it a little harder to figure out who owns the site who might also be a 10K SOpedian.
    – random
    Sep 5, 2009 at 13:24
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It's a clone. There are few signs. Like the url to the questions doesnt use dashes for space. The css files are different and more.

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The resemblance is... uncanny. But, all the questions are months old. And even if those dates were faked for some bizarre reason, there's this.

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3

So close and yet so far. It falls on the Uncanny Valley of website clones. It is very very close, but it feels totally weird.

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wickedawesomewallpapers.com is running Django: http://wickedawesomewallpapers.com/terms

(in case they fix it, that page currently says:

Page not found (404) Request Method: GET Request URL: http://wickedawesomewallpapers.com/terms

Using the URLconf defined in urls, Django tried these URL patterns, in this order:

  1. ^$
  2. [...]
  3. ^media/(?P.*)$

The current URL, terms, didn't match any of these.

You're seeing this error because you have DEBUG = True in your Django settings file. Change that to False, and Django will display a standard 404 page.

Hey, I found the admin login)

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  • They have a double-agent in their server settings!
    – random
    Sep 5, 2009 at 10:16
  • I don't get the connection to wickedawesomewallpapers.com?
    – kanamekun
    Sep 5, 2009 at 17:05
  • 1
    @kanamekun: If you force an error on WAW ( wickedawesomewallpapers.com/render/a ) and scroll all the way down to the Django settings, you will notice that the admin value is set to (('Rob', '[email protected]'),). Robstar is the owner of wedding nuts and googlewavez (see his twitter account). Also, doing the same for GearCult (which is hosted on the same server as Weddingnuts. gearcult.com/tech/a ) reveals the admin is once again 'Rob'.
    – Josh Hunt
    Sep 6, 2009 at 1:24
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http://socialwire.ca/?p=42

Interesting!

Social Wire has entered the social forum space with a unique engine of our own. Similar to other Q&A sites out there, GoogleWaveZ takes the forum to the next level. Blending questions, answers, wikis, reputation and a voting system to create a social forum totally run by its users.

Social Wire Inc. will be white-labeling this engine and launching a self serve version to the public in Early 2010.

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Interesting! Apparently, smart guys got CNProg code running in the first time. Nice job on UI tweaking and English translation.

Ah? No sign of CNProg!? hmm.. can i say these are rip-off CNProg? oh.. they even stole my code and said "unique own engine"..

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  • 1
    Link seems duff.
    – Marc Gravell
    Oct 16, 2009 at 11:52
0

A quick way to check, go to 

http://{website}/users/flair/1.html

None of the copycat sites, as far as I know, have user "flair".

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I love how it is prepopulated with fake users and content. If you look around on the user pages of some users, like these ones:

... you can see that their reputation and the number of votes they've received + accepted answers + etc don't add up.

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