If you visit the JED frequently you may have noticed periods of extremely long connect times or occasional outages in the past few weeks.

 
This is because the site has had a series of denial of service attacks resulting from individuals or groups attempting to create a new extensions site by scraping the JED.  These individuals created up to 12,000 simultaneous connections every day, for weeks, in order to gather this information.  This action prevented legitimate users from being able to connect and use the JED as they should.

The content of the JED is copyrighted by Open Source Matters and by the individual contributors. It is not permissible to copy it.  We recently instituted a trimming of our RSS feed to protect the JED listings from being copied, specifically because of the practice of creating new directory sites by compiling the feed into content.  The scraping circumvented our feeds and gathered information from the site directly.

Because of this, today we filed a DMCA complaint about one such instance.  We were able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this new directory is a direct copy of our listings and their descriptions. 

We have taken this action to protect the functioning of our site as well as the work of those who manage the JED, submit extensions to the JED, and those who write reviews.

We put a lot of work in the JED, and for others to gain by scraping, and hurt the performance of the site in the process, is not something we can allow to go on.