Can we block other users?

[Guest Marshymellow]

Hello, I’m sorry if this has been asked and answered before. I searched the net and the site but did not find any info on it. Just as the title says: CAN WE BLOCK A FELLOW USER OF AFForg? Or at least prevent them from seeing our works and profile? Thanks!

[JayDee]

People have been asking this about me for ten years,

[Guest Marshymellow]

Ah, haha. Well, I was just wondering because of a plagiarist issue… I was just hoping I could simply block them instead of having to deal with them all over again… I really hope it can be done. (I’d like to believe you are not that person I am thinking of blocking, haha.) Thanks.

[JayDee]

I suspect you can’t block ‘em simply because no part of the site is behind a password wall for viewing, so any blocked account could just log out and use a proxy or whatever and still view your stories/profile.

If someone is harrassing you or plagiarising you then your best bet is to just raise that in the TOS Violations subforum. The site’s staff come down firmly against that sort of thing. They’re not keen on it at all.

I’m sure a mod’ll be along to give you a proper answer anyhow, bit of a quiet time of day usually right now but certainly at some point!

[Guest Marshymellow]

I actually brought it up, but the plagiarising happened on FFnet more than a year ago and the plagiarist deleted his/her account there and published entirely new stuff here. This person also has so many accounts spread throughout the most popular fanfiction sites and is a bit of a whack job who likes to pretend he/she are different people (and is eerily unconscientious in feigning innocence even in the face of such obvious duplicity) so I was hoping to simply avoid crossing paths with him/her altogether but I think you’re right… It does seem like I can’t protect myself from this person on AFForg or maybe from anywhere on the internet… I kind of knew this but I wanted to get some extra precautions and defenses up no matter how small it would’ve helped but oh well… I guess I’ll just have to hope and pray that he/she grows up and leaves me alone. 

Thank you so much for your advice. I appreciate it! 

. 

[pittwitch]

The staff here does not take kindly to members harassing each other.  Report anything like that immediately to the TOS Team.  Do not remove the reviews until a staff member can screen shot them.  We do enforce our TOS.  I solemnly swear.

[BronxWench]

If this person has plagiarised in the past, odds are whatever they have posted here isn’t their work, either. As lead archive moderator, I’d greatly appreciate knowing this member’s pen name. If you don’t want to post it here, and it’s entirely understandable if you don’t, you can email us at tos_team@adult-fanfiction.org, or you can PM me over on FFN as well (since guests can’t use our forum PM system). I’m BronxWench over there, too.

[Guest Marshymellow]

11 hours ago, pittwitch said:

The staff here does not take kindly to members harassing each other.  Report anything like that immediately to the TOS Team.  Do not remove the reviews until a staff member can screen shot them.  We do enforce our TOS.  I solemnly swear.

1

Thanks so much. It’s a bit more complicated than the usual harassment and plagiarising. It happened on FFnet but the user has deleted their account there. This user has multiple accounts on AO3 where they pretend to be different people but in 2 of their accounts there he has attacked other members of AO3 calling them very rude vulgar names. I reported it to the AO3 staff, but sadly I haven’t got any reaction at all (which is weird because they usually respond within reasonable time). 

As of now, I only chanced upon this person’s AFForg account. I have lots of evidence to prove that this is the same person even if they are *again* using a different alias and posing as a different person. These has been no interaction between this person and me on AFForg yet, so technically, he hasn’t done anything to me here. Yet. But since I already know this person’s “ugly side” I just thought that I would prevent any untoward incidents by simply blocking him. He has exhibited signs of being psychotic and delusional and even if we tried to reason with him before privately, he only retaliated with public attacks. I honestly just want to avoid him and write my stories in peace and interact with rest of the sane community without fear. 

11 hours ago, BronxWench said:

If this person has plagiarised in the past, odds are whatever they have posted here isn’t their work, either. As lead archive moderator, I’d greatly appreciate knowing this member’s pen name. If you don’t want to post it here, and it’s entirely understandable if you don’t, you can email us at tos_team@adult-fanfiction.org, or you can PM me over on FFN as well (since guests can’t use our forum PM system). I’m BronxWench over there, too.

Thank you so much. Unfortunately, this person’s method of plagiarising isn’t the conventional “copy and paste”. Rather, he very subtly steals elements from other writers’ and incorporates it into his own writing. It ranges from almost anything he feels like ripping off, from specific words, ideas, formatting, syntax, and so on; it is so subtle that I only caught on what exactly this person was doing, a year later of him doing it to me (among others). He does writing of his own (he has a very distinct over-descriptive and pedantic style) but mashes it with elements he picks up from others. Unless the texts from where he copied are extensively studied and analyzed alongside his work, it is very hard to tell. It’s seriously creepy. Even I didn’t want to believe it at first and kept telling myself it was just one creepy coincidence after another. However, I became convinced because of the pattern and timing of its occurrences. For instance, after I published something before on FFnet or AO3, this person would suddenly publish a week or two later with the certain very same elements from my new story/chapter… And then this would happen again, and again… But then, when compared to all of his previous works, you will see that those elements (such as certain words, or nuances in writing) were not a normal part of how he used to do them before. (There was a time when he didn’t use any footnotes at all, but suddenly, he copied the exact same way I made footnotes, in the same formatting. Of course, I know this isn’t exactly plagiarism, but I am just giving an example of how subtly he incorporates what he sees from others into his own work.)
I have tried to ask for help from AO3 but he is very sly and cunning. You could pass off his work as almost plagiarism but not exactly. I am only extra keen about this because I have actually gone through a case to do with copyright infringement before and have analyzed lots of works like this. But unless one goes through the same pains, it is almost impossible to detect. Which is why I’m so tired of trying to fight him. He even has this whole “I am good and positive and holy” and quite fanatic “religious” image going on about him, but then if you try to reason with him and point out things he doesn’t want to hear, he’ll spit curses and slander you on his public page like a true psycho (he’s done this before, in fact, in two of his AO3 sites, he still has the very rude bashing message up on his page). Honestly, I just don’t want anything to do with him anymore. He is beyond reason.  Which is why I thought, that the only solution I have right now is to “avoid” him as much as possible. If I simply blocked him he wouldn’t see my work and would have no material to steal… Sorry, I did my best to sum up the situation as concisely as possible but it’s kind of hard to explain.

If you still want me to give you his usernames here and on the other sites, let me know, and I will send them to you privately.

Thank you so much! I appreciate it, and I really wish I could do more to help expose this person, but it’s just not worth it anymore. He is a hopeless case. He’ll just make more accounts and spread out and go on with his charade...

[BronxWench]

Do PM me or email me. It’s always good to have that sort of information on record, in case we get a complaint about this person. 

For the record, we do investigate even subtle instances of plagiarism, and we do take action if we find there is sufficient reason to think someone’s intellectual property was used improperly. My personal belief is that even fan fiction, despite not being something a writer can profit from, is still very much the writer’s hard work and property aside from the copyrighted aspects of the fan fiction. 

I’m very sorry you’ve had to go through this. It’s unfortunate when fiction archives don’t treat plagiarism like what it is—theft of intellectual property, and a crime.

[Guest Marshymellow]

Alright, I will send all the names and account links of this person I know of via your FFnet account. 

Also, I read your profile over there and it almost made me cry. Very few people care, let alone understand how awful it feels to have someone do this to you. I have suffered for more than a year (I still do sometimes) because of what he’s done. I am not a gifted writer but I try so hard to write because it makes me happy. The feeling of finding out that someone has been leeching off my hard work and claiming it to be theirs has been a very painful one (especially since he has been around longer and has more followers, naturally people would think I am the one who copied because I am relatively a nobody). Plus, with the way this person is so absolutely self-assured (enough to say in one of his DeviantArt entries that he is “quite the writer already” and that he believes he is ready to publish professionally), you can imagine how he asserts himself against anyone who opposes him. He believes he is absolutely above human err. Sorry, I am clearly still aggrieved even if I do my best to move on, haha. I will stop now and send you the info.

Again, thank you! Just the fact that someone understands means so much to me. Thanks so much! Truly. 

[BronxWench]

It happened to authors on FFN who I truly liked and respected, and while I know my protest hasn’t changed anything there, it was something about which I felt strongly enough to take a stand.

I think what bothers me the most is the notion that it’s a victimless crime, whereas nothing can be further from the truth. It saps one’s confidence, and wears away at one’s spirit, and that is utterly unacceptable to me. We need to support each other, especially when we find the courage to put our writing out there for sale, when we create an original work and offer it. We’re not going to get rich, and most of us know that, but it is still so incredibly satisfying to see something for sale under our name, isn’t it? 

[Guest Marshymellow]

You are so right. Just to share a little bit of my heartache…

I am not really a gifted writer (I do not say this out of false modesty). I am more of an artist. I see imagery and it is very difficult for me to translate into words. I struggled with this for a long time (along the way I even discovered I have dyslexia though my brain has compensated fabulously). Anyway, what I’m trying to say is, what would probably be a walk in the park for a gifted writer is a really long and painstaking process for me. It took me years. Yes, years to even complete my first Hetalia fic. I never stopped practicing though. I enjoyed making people smile, even if my works cater to only a minority of the fandom (except when I write porn, haha). 

So to wake up one day and find someone ripping off what I worked so hard for and even getting more credit than me for it (because he’s been around longer), oh, it was the worst nightmare. I don’t even care about money, I just don’t want other people getting credit for something they didn’t honestly do. Especially since I know how hard it is to make something original, from your heart and soul and your most personal experiences. When I was unable to stop this person even after more than a year, I began to get very depressed. The most horrible effect was that I could not write anymore. I would see my words as meaningless every time I put them down, and my mind would tell me “why bother if it’s just going to end up on HIS stories, on HIS page and he would be getting the credit for your hard work?”. That was the saddest point in my life as a poor, nobody fanfiction writer. Heh. Sob story, I know, but it’s true. And nobody may care enough about me, but I know in my heart that I worked honestly for every single story and art I put out there… I was proud of that, but even that, he took away from me. He made my own words haunt me everytime I tried to write…

Then my friends started telling I was overreacting and that I should just go with the flow and not be overly sensitive… Truthfully, I even felt like taking my own life because writing was one of the few things that made me truly feel free and happy. And to have someone take it from me AGAIN… It was just too much. I felt so alone in my struggles… No one understood.

Somehow I’m still here. I guess part of the reason I tried to just move on were the few people who actually read and enjoyed my work. I wanted to keep writing. Anyway. I have to stop now, but I just wanted to let you know that I am just happy someone understands. I am. Thank you.