Hi everyone,
That forum belongs to me, one of many websites I own. It's a startup site with no real activity. I usually let them sit for a while before promoting and marketing them to start gaining real activity. Yes the content is scraped from Yahoo! Answers. No, it's not illegal, it follows the Yahoo! API TOS. As far as stripping links, the API only serves the questions and answers, but doesn't serve the source (which is were people would place links). They are never pulled, so are not stripped. Travis did contact me and I did add links to the signatures fake member names of post he originated as a courtesy.

These types of techniques are common, although unethical, it's not illegal.