I'm pretty sure I beta'd (or at least read early version and gushed) Unatoned as well.

You guys caught me.

Hi, Pers!

 

Eh, this one posted The Denarian Renegade and The Black Prince.

https://www.fanfiction.net/u/5695504/nos-tres-reges

Too much free time is the true bane of mankind I guess.

 

You've no proof of that! My online anonymity is ironclad, I tell you.

Okay, DLP, time to get sleuthin'. Who've we pissed off? Someone actively attacking the more frequent members of the site - which, for the most part, are the more popular authors... What other clues do we have?

Personally I'm convinced based on how helpful and on the ball they're being, that all this plagiarism was Mkis the whole time! I'm on to you, pal. Merry fucking Christmas.

Seriously, it's pointless way passed the pointof pathetic, whoever is doing this. Can't figure out the angle, but I'll be happy to join any witch hunt.

 

Well, we can narrow it down somewhat. The first time my story was stolen from the contest section here, it only had ~800 views at the time, which is a paltry amount over a 4 year period. It had been posted nowhere else prior to it being stolen and posted on ffn, so if you assume that it was someone with a minor amount of posts and not a dlp veteran, the list is probably only 100-200 users long. Now, from a previous plagiarizing spree, the thief had taken a story with an update that was less than 24 hours old (sorry, I forget exactly what the story in the wba was), so there is a list of users who accessed that story during that particular time frame. If we could somehow correlate the two user lists, you could probably narrow it down to handful of users.

 

Don't worry, I forgive you, Anarchy. It was very shortly after I updated Great and Terrible. I think the mods have done that though.

 

The story was Sesc's Traitors Son.

 

Well now the guy has a "vladtheo" account and while the retard was stealing my stories before, this is first time he has tied "Theo" to it. Interesting that this happens right when I become active again.

Not just some random fuckup with a grudge against dlp. He's deliberately targeting individuals among us.

They might be new accounts, but given that I've been afk for a few years, I predict whoever it is has been around for a long time.

 

Putting on my Will Graham hat:

*weird lighty thing whoosh*
*weird lighty thing whoosh*

*in a dull monotone voice*

I'm sitting at home, in my mother's basement. Her attempts to make me look for a job, for the seventy-fourth week in a row, has failed.

I've masturbated for the third time today to pictures of that short alien know-it-all hotty Moz something in the Force Awakens. Need mom to buy more Kleenex. Tell mom I have a cold. That works every time.

Tried to log on to DLP under old accounts that have been banned by those bastard mods. Failed.

Might as well create five more accounts at ff.net and return to my plagiarizing ways. I really like it when I get reviews from stories that I stole.

Think about the know-it-all hotty Moz again. It's the goggles, I think.

Damn. Mkis is onto me again. I really need to do something about her.

I'm hungry.

This is my design.

*blinks eyes open*

I've got it. It's *gurgle*.

*body drops to floor and bleeds everywhere.*

Tune in next season to find out if I survived...

 

I just noticed that a lot of those accounts are from 2013. Can you change ffn user names after account creation?

 

Yes.

(I changed mine a few years ago to capitalize the first letter. I'd felt I'd earned it at the time.)

 

Damn. My ultimate grand plan of taking over the literary world by impersonating 17 authors at the same time has been exposed.

First, I said to myself, earn their trust...

 

Tracking the plagiarizer will be extremely difficult and time consuming, if it is possible at all in the first place. Also, even if we do catch the culprit, there's nothing that will stop him from coming back under a different account.

The only long-term solution I can think of is restricting the WbA even more. Perhaps what we could do is make a system where we give WbA access to those who actively participate in giving feedback, and bar those who do not.

Yes, I know this sounds very drastic, but I think some kind of solution is necessary, and I can’t think of any other one. Plagiarism has become a major problem, one that has caused several authors to avoid WbA and use other methods (Google docs, private groups, etc) instead. WbA is for authors, first and foremost. And since authors’ works (especially those that have not been published on other sites yet) are being endangered, something needs to be done.

I also realize that doing this will stop the majority of people from being able to read WbA stories. The thing is, that’s the point. WbA isn’t here for people to read stories. The purpose of WbA is for authors to gain feedback/assistance on an early draft of their work before they publish it. In a sense, the WbA system is a deal between the author and other DLP members. DLP members are given the opportunity to read a story before publication under the condition that they give feedback to the author. People who do not contribute (e.g. casual readers who use WbA just to read fics) have no business in WbA.

For example, I have contributed next to nothing in the WbA section until now (other than participating in the two Pokemon Quests). So, I don’t deserve to have access to WbA, unless I start giving useful feedback. Otherwise it would be unfair to the author.

I realize that I got off topic as I went on. The point is that something needs to be done about the plagiarism issue. My idea could be a solution since it will offer a lot more protection from plagiarism, and allow the admins/mods to closely keep track of who has access to WbA. Of course, if there’s a less drastic method that works, then you could just throw out my idea.

 

Hmmmmm.


I say we do in depth background checks on every author who had their fics stolen. Clearly, if this is an inside job, the culprit will include their own stories among those plagiarized, so that they rise above suspicion.

I say this as someone who hasn't had anything stolen as of yet.

 

This idea has been brought up and discussed extensively and there are problems with it. Besides, it's not like WBA sees major traffic. To use myself as an example, I have periods of activity and lack of activity there and I would hate to be excluded based on that. Managing this would be a pain in the ass for the staff.

 

I haven't been paying too much attention to this thread but I saw this and reported it.

The Prince Who Was Promised by theotheinhaler reviews

The Prince Who Was Promised

Crossover - Harry Potter & Game of Thrones - Rated: T - English - Adventure/Romance - Chapters: 1 - Words: 6,793 - Reviews: 8 - Favs: 7 - Follows: 7 - Published: 10h ago

 

Here is a problem with simply changing rules in place - whoever this already has copies of a lot of plagiarized work and could always repost them again and again. Restricting the WbA further would only prevent newer works from being uploaded.

 

Oh here's a fun one:

Dagger and Rose by vladtheinahaler reviews
Dumbledore doesn't ignore the 2nd prophecy! He apprentices Harry and teaches him a rare form of magic, but draws the ire of a secret society who seek to guard this knowledge and do Harry in. Assassination attempts on multiple fronts. H/F, Yr. 4 GoF AU.
Rated: T - English - Adventure/Romance - Chapters: 1 - Words: 5,064 - Reviews: 2 - Favs: 2 - Follows: 3 - Published: 11h ago - Harry P., Fleur D.

Gonna wonder about how much effort this guy is putting into making 10 different accounts and copy and pasting rather well known stories that clearly aren't his.

-SK

 

Most of the accounts have been cleared.

Restricting WbA would not have had an impact on this. This time most of the stolen material was freely available on FFN anyway.

 

I'm inclined to agree, for the record. I'm not sure there's a systemic approach to curbing this other than just ignoring it and removing the stories. Eventually the guy's going to have to get bored with it all.

 

The person who's doing all of this has, no doubt, all those stories saved. Removing them would accomplish nothing.