The article isn't talking about public discussion forums at all, it's talking about WordPress and its owner, Automattic. The article is a blog post on a WordPress-hosted blog. It then goes on to talk about consent in software in general.
Personally, I'm not really okay with what you're calling public forum harvesting either. I've put a lot of work into Stack Exchange answers and I am not okay with a for-profit company recycling and possibly outright regurgitating that work without attribution. (The latter would be a flagrant violation of CC BY-SA, of course.)
Personally, I'm not really okay with what you're calling public forum harvesting either. I've put a lot of work into Stack Exchange answers and I am not okay with a for-profit company recycling and possibly outright regurgitating that work without attribution. (The latter would be a flagrant violation of CC BY-SA, of course.)