The people behind learninglaravel.net are only out to profit from the content the community creates. Please avoid them.

I recently started a new publication and as I was browsing Medium one day I came across an article by Amo Chohan covering upcoming changes in PHP 7.1. I thought it’d be a perfect fit my existing audience and sent him a request to add it to the publication.

Amo agreed and that night I spent an hour creating a lead image and published it the next day. The article itself became an instant success.

Today I was very surprised when I loaded up Hacker News and saw that a scraped version of the article was on the front page pointing to Learning Laravel. As most people would do, I quickly made a comment with the original link and a few others asked if the link could be changed since it added no value.

Nothing changed for most of the day, until the afternoon when I went to check on it again. The link was the same but when I clicked over to their site, the whole article had been replaced by a plagiarized version complete with a brand new author credit.

Wow, yeah. They seriously rewrote it entirely and removed the source link just to maintain the traffic flow from HN? — CiPHPerCoder

Later the link was changed on Hacker News to credit the original source and order restored.

The bigger problem is this isn’t the first time I’ve seen and had problems with Learning Laravel.

I run laravel-news.com and when I decided to create the site I missed out on registering the domain “laravelnews.com” by about a week. That is why I added the dash. A year or so later the “laravelnews.com” domain was purchased by them and forwarded to their site. I only found about it from a tweet from a friend:

Before all of that, PHPJerk documented a lot of weird stuff with them back in 2014. Everything from stealing images, using things without credit, to plagiarism. PHPJerk sums it nicely:

If you truly ARE trying your “best to contribute to the Laravel community” then fucking prove it! Because from my standpoint, it looks like you want the Laravel community to contribute to your bank account.

I am writing this as a partial rant because I’m angry, but more importantly to bring to light shady practices within our community.

We have no place for people like this and I implore you to unfollow them, ignore them, and stay away from anything they put out.