It is well known that we do not condone piracy and usually the way to handle links to pirated sources is to replace them with corresponding legal ones.
A question asked today, Is the fencer subclass from 'Giger's' homebrew?, links to this fencer homebrew page. The homebrew is perfectly fine, but I think the site contains pirated non-SRD material for D&D 5e. There is no alternate location where the same fencer homebrew has been posted.
How should we handle this situation?
In this case, the content could be copied wholesale as it's CC-BY-SA. That wouldn't direct traffic to the pirate site, and would preserve the content being inquired about.
In this case the creator has not supplied their name, so we wouldn't even have to include an attribution. Just clearly labelling it CC-BY-SA and a link to the license
Update: Found the author of the page. AnnieGrimmsdottre
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#attribution:
How do I properly attribute material offered under a Creative Commons license?
All CC licenses require users to attribute the creator of licensed material, unless the creator has waived that requirement, not supplied a name, or asked that her name be removed.
Author: AnnieGrimmsdottre License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
I have reproduced the entire subclass word-for-word on D&D Beyond.
As D&D Beyond does not violate any OGL licenses like the source site does, linking here provides access to the information without needing to link to a site that violates a separate site policy. I suggest a sentence posted in a way like what follows:
...I came across a website called Giger's 5e D&D. In it there is a subclass called Fencer which I have fully reproduced on D&D Beyond...
I think we should allow the link to the homebrew specifically, but not the link to the site's homepage currently in the question because it's not necessary. We should also quote or describe some of the homebrew to identify it when the page inevitably goes dead.
That's a weird conclusion but I base this conclusion on a few factors.
Let's get the most fundamental issue out of the way: do we accept the question? It isn't doing anything wrong itself, it's just asking about a piece of homebrew, so yes we should. That leaves the matter of how to clearly identify and reference the homebrew involved.
To identify it, we need to describe it or quote it. I believe our standard we'd expect from any new question would be to quote part of the homebrew and direct us to it, otherwise we'd close it as unclear, so we should follow that same standard here. Either way that means directing people back to the source, which is that page on that site that contains pirated materials.
Now, our policy about linking to dndtools.eu and similar sites was about proliferating references to piracy sites. It especially came up in the context of people linking to non-SRD materials (because they couldn't find it on SRD sites or on D&D Beyond) which represented an ethical and pragmatic problem: the ethical problem was we're effectively condoning piracy by hosting those references, the pragmatic problem was the site would inevitably become a 404 due to DMCA notices or other takedown actions.
Let's examine our situation against those two issues if we link back to the homebrew:
That leaves us with: describe (possibly partly quote) the homebrew and direct back to it like we would expect with any homebrew request, but do nothing more than that. Avoid drawing attention back to the site itself.
Usage of the site as a reference should otherwise be handled like normal: don't do that, and don't link to its non-SRD pirated content.
In this specific case the fact that there are no legitimate source does effectively answer the question, and therefore a link to the content itself in not necessary.
