Don’t do it. Simple as that. This user decided to do it and has been banned for six months. I had at least a modicum of respect for them when they were trying to get their stories accepted despite not meeting quality standards in their attempts, but now that’s gone. Anyone who steals someone’s hard work and tries to pass it off as their own by making a number of changes so it doesn’t come up easily in a search, is taking advantage of the original author and being incredibly disrespectful. Here is the original story that LordMReaper tried to pass off as his own. Feel free to check it out and give the author credit for her hard work. He made edits so it wouldn’t match up in google if you tried to look for it, but it’s going to take more than that to fool us. I gave him an hour to try and explain himself and get his six month ban lessened, but instead he chose to try to blank the page and throw a temper-tantrum like the child he is.
With DMCA being as it is now, we’re going to be under a lot more scrutiny for the content of stories. More observant users will notice that Little Pink Backpack, They Hurt Me, Mask Death Demon, and a number of other stories have recently been removed under author request. This is because copyright and ownership are now more important than ever. Those authors are trying to take those stories and submit them to magazines, license movie deals out of them, publish them, etc. Best of luck to them. This impacts us as when staff rolls around to delete a story and it's not cited, it looks really bad on the site.
Why create a blog for one user’s stupidity?[]
That’s simple, because it isn’t just one user. This past week we’ve deleted seven separate stories that have directly ripped the premise for another story, copy/pasted a wikipedia article, or ripped a story word-for-word without bothering to credit the original author (sometimes even referring to the story as theirs). We will not accept this. Stealing someone else’s work and not even bothering to credit them is a terrible thing to do and doing it will not end well.
We are about to really crack down on content that steal premises/plot wholesale from other stories. Some will notice 1999’s “Paint with the Soul - Episode 2, "How to Find Berries”” section bearing a striking similarity to Alantutorial’s series. Feel free to look at them side-by-side. This is not going to fly by unnoticed. We will be citing Alantutorials' influence properly with a disclaimer in 1999.
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There is nothing wrong with wanting to share a good story, really this whole site is based off of the act of sharing stories. That being said, there is something wrong with not citing or crediting the author. Even if you don’t know this template: {{Cred|Author’s Name}}, you should still try to credit them in some way on the story. Even if the name isn’t listed, you should link to the source/site that hosted them. Not doing this creates a lot of problems and can even result in legal issues. We want this site to continue to host good stories and we want authors to continue to get credit for their time and effort. There's no shame in being inspired by something. Hell, I even have a page dedicated to content that inspired me.
Too long; didn’t read: Don’t plagiarize, cite the proper author/sources if it isn’t yours (as it’s the only thing that might save you from a six month ban like LordMReaper.). There's no shame in being inspired by something. Just make sure your inspiration doesn't drive you into foolish decisions.