Gamestation have finally replied to my requests and have provided this list of all the fake gamestation sites they had.
Some are quite funny and I would have loved to have found them when they were up!
To help launch their new-look website, Gamestation recently held a competition for their customers to find other websites that “stole” their new design. The competition encouraged customers to investigate websites that ended in “station.co.uk”. I found a few but it never got recognised on the website and I never heard back from anyone. I asked gamestation’s customer support for some details of the competition and they were as helpful as a brick wall.
Confirmed websites such as grannystation.co.uk and chavstation.co.uk were found and posted on the gamestation’s competition page.
Screenshot as of 7th November 2011 of the competition page on the gamestation website
As soon as I figured out that all the fake websites adhered to a simple naming pattern, (plus with me being a bit geeky and excited about writing something new) I wrote a powershell script that attempted to visit every site. The script took in the English dictionary of words between 2 and 8 characters long and appended “station.co.uk”. If it found a link to the gamestation.co.uk website, it would log it and move on to the next.
Lo-and-behold it found two more that had not been posted on the gamestation site. I didn’t really care if I won the grand prize, I just did it for the fun and wanted to investigate all the work that the designers went to to create these sister sites.
I found www.tutustation.co.uk and www.bongstation.co.uk
I entered the competition and checked back daily to see if my new findings were detailed on the site. Nope. Long after the competition ended, I emailed customer services and these are the responses I received:
Sorry but this competition does not run anymore . I no longer have access to any information regarding this.
Regards,
Syd W
I responded by saying “I know it doesn’t run anymore, that’s why I’m asking. How come you have no information regarding the competition? I would just like a list of the websites that were involved. Some information is available at [link to competition page] but it’s old and that information was available before the end of the competition.”
I would [...] like to apologise for any confusion. A list of the ‘fake’ websites and winners can be found by following the link below:
http://www.gamestation.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HubArticleView?hubId=148280&articleId=148287&catalogId=10202&langId=45&storeId=10651
I apologise for any confusion this may have caused, and please do not hesitate to contact us with any further queries you may have.
Regards,
Sam F
Haha, this is the same link that I had just emailed to them! I ask again: “I’m afraid that is not the case. I found http://tutustation.co.uk/ but that is not listed. Why can’t you provide the full information?”
The competition regrettably is now over. If you have submitted your answer to the competition providers they will contact us direct if you are winner.
If you have any further queries please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Regards,
Charlotte H
Their excuse of the competition being over implies that I should have asked while the competition was running! What a joke. At least now though I have learned from this email that the competition providers are a separate company to gamestation, yet at the bottom of the competition page it clearly states: “The promoter of the competition is Gameplay (GB) Ltd. trading as Gamestation”.
For now I don’t think I will ever find out what the other fake gamestation sites were. Maybe I did find them all? My curiosity is not yet satisfied.
Just got a new laptop and noticed a few youtube videos were green and garbled as if they had been corrupted. I went and disabled hardware acceleration in the flash settings and now everything is fine 
Let’s say you were coding up program that required a number of base 24, how would you go about it? Think now of how you would do it in your own programming language. No really… think about it and think about the resulting type. You’re returning a string right? Depending on your programming language, you might have gone for the approach of assuming a base 10 input, then using division and the remainder operator to go through a dictionary of strings a,b,c,A,B,C. The type of the result is a string which is cumbersome to work with. For example, how would you add 1 to it? I’m guessing you’d have to convert it back to base 10, add one, then reconvert. In my opinion that is a lot of (too much) hassle.
Well how about we think a little differently… Continue reading »
I’ve just recently bought 3ible.com and 3ible.co.uk based on nothing other than the fact that the domains look like the word Bible.
Don’t know how I’m going to use these but I have them for two years so I have that time to think up a brilliant plan!
I was thinking of sending all 3ible.com traffic over to youversion.com as I greatly admire their responsive ajaxy site. It’s a huge step up from the stone-age biblenet.com and has lots of great translations (My current favourite is GOD’S WORD translation)
That is all for now, gonna be writing some more posts soon when I have some time!
Oh and Microsoft support is awesome 
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