Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...

I'll be upfront about this. Sometimes, when I am finished reading through digg, and all the techy blogs I subscribe too (and I am too brain dead to do anything else but not tired enough to go to bed) I like to have a look where Wahanda is being mentioned on the interweb. The name gets dropped around various forums.

Running wahanda.com -site:wahanda.com in google tells me all the places the name is used outside our site. It sometimes throws up interesting results.

One result that caught my eye was here - http://www.zoomki.es/js/2 (i'm not even going to do a nofollow link to these guys). It showed up because of this text:

/*
=====================================================
Wahanda.com
Global JavaScript functions library
=====================================================
*/

Yup - the header on our javascript. Not exactly the latest code, but ours nonetheless. Truncating the uri showed that they had indeed taken all of our javascript. And truncating again redirected to http://www.monazen.com/es/home. A site that looks eerily familiar - even more familiar when I put it through the google (again!) translator to reveal exactly the same words used for some labels. Many of the icons are the direct rips of ours, as is the general page layout and even their logo bears more than a passing resemblance.

.... translated, becomes....





It's all a bit cheeky really.

What to do?
I'm not big on the whole legal action thingumy - lawyers get paid plenty without me giving them a helping hand. And there is no doubt I look and learn from other peoples code and, yes, websites. But then again, this site is a direct competitor, albeit not in a region we are focusing on just now and this is a direct rip.

There are a few hints out there by people who have experienced the same thing. they discuss what to do if your site is ripped off by someone else and how to respond to plagiarism.

Looks like they might be getting a friendly email in the next couple of days...