Poly Haven recently discovered that their HDRi's are mirrored by a site that's using their old name - HDRI haven. Since their content is CC0 licensed, this might be legally ok, but it's obviously an ethically incorrect thing to do. So here's a word of warning: go directly to polyhaven.com instead of googling for them and falling for these con artists.
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
3 Comments
This explains all the ads and the worse browsing experience :(.
As you said, while this might legally be OK it really sucks :(.
Thanks for the heads up!
One notable feature of the scam site is that they publish no contact information.
Best thing I was able to find was this: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/lp/request-ovhcloud-registered-domain/
Fortunately, my (old) bookmark takes me to polyhaven now, so all good, they won't catch me.
the impostors are also using the old logo, which could be copyright infringement because as far as I know that logo hasn't been placed in the public domain.
But the best thing to do for everybody is to support Polyhaven on Patreon if you are able to do so, that way a bit of freeloading won't have impact.