Shady Japanese deck (botted reviews & copyright infringement)
First off, I want to clarify that this is not a hate post, but a piece of research that I have done on the deck for a few months now. I will put the evidence at the end of the post.
The deck I am talking about is the "Full Japanese Study Deck". Personally, I have started using the deck to study about one year ago (found out about it on this subreddit). I used to periodically update it and could not help but see multiple reviews, all posted in a short amount of time (some on the same day) and most of the time all being essentially the same. Eventually they all (or most of them) got deleted, which clearly suggests that they were botted.
Another thing that I found kinda shady is the fact that the author scraped and used data from jpdb.io without the website's permission, as they even mentioned in one review reply, claiming they tried to contact the website, but did not receive a response (and still proceeded and continues to use the scraped data). When I looked through the deck's GitHub page, I found out that they even package all the scraped data in their repository, making it publicly available. I do not want to say anything about the usage of data from the other sources, as I do not quite understand how the licences work.
As a final point, though not really necessary, the author had a Buy Me a Coffee and GitHub Sponsors page for donations which, in my opinion, is a bit of a bad look, considering all of my previous points.
Here is evidence:
| Point | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Botted reviews | https://archive.ph/wA8Ja |
| Removed botted reviews | https://archive.ph/ZaX2H |
| jpdb.io scraped data | https://github.com/Ronokof/Full-Japanese-Study-Deck/releases/tag/10.2.2 (packaged in the release), https://archive.ph/ZaX2H (author testimony in a review reply; search for "jpdb.io" in the page) |
| Buy Me a Coffee page | https://archive.ph/IHOwF |
| Deleted Buy Me a Coffee page | https://archive.ph/5XwSM |
| GitHub Sponsors page | https://archive.ph/pmdEz |
There are multiple snapshots of various of the author's page, so anyone is free to search for other pieces of information. But, more importantly, I would like to bring this whole situation to Anki's staff's attention, as it is clearly written in Anki's ToS that copyrighted content used without the owner's consent is not allowed.