I recently experienced and issue with one of my Xamarin apps and decided to post the problem on the Xamarin Forums. It’s a little obscure but I’m hoping that someone, somewhere has experienced the same thing and can point me in the right direction.

Well, in my lunch-break today I decided to take another look and entered the most concise search term I could think of – and received only 6 results, sometimes a good sign, sometimes not.

In this case it was the latter, mainly because there was only, actually one result – a link to my post on the Xamarin Forum. So what were these other results? Well, they all point to the same site – Help4Mobile, which claims to use;

a concept which minimizes the duplicated subjects and content

Ironically it appears to do this by scraping data from other sites (which sounds like duplication in my book).

In the screenshot you can see my original post at the top (which is good I suppose). The next one down is the same post, scraped and re-posted by the help4mobile site. Now I’m not sure what will happen if someone was to reply to that post – I certainly wouldn’t know about it – so what’s the point?

google search results mostly aggregators

The remaining results are different posts (probably scraped from some unsuspecting 3rd party site somewhere) and are returned because the sidebar on those pages contains links to the scraped version of my original post.

Now I’m confused by this. What is the point of this site?

  • It has no Ads so can’t be trying to get traffic to generate revenue.
  • The original poster will probably never know if anyone actually replies to their questions – because they didn’t post it on help4mobile.

Basically all this site is, from what I can see, totally pointless.