Spamdexing of fanfiction.net stories and info!

[amberdreams]

Posted by velvetwhip HERE
ATTENTION ALL WRITERS ON FANFICTION.NET!!!!!! *****IMPORTANT!!!!!!*****

If you have stories posted on fanfiction.net, they've almost certainly been stolen (along with your profiles) by fake websites which are mirroring ff.net and using YOUR work to make money with ads. This is called "spamdexing" and it is WRONG!

These are the websites:


http://www.thebuystock.org/
http://www.talkfictions.com/
http://fictionavenue.org/
http://thanfiction.org/
http://hmofiction.org/
http://fanfic-journal.com/

Do NOT log into these fake sites as they will steal your email and password info. Instead, you need to report them.

HOW TO REPORT

Go here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreportform?hl=en
Put in the name of the website (one report each)
Write in additional details: This is a spamdexing mirror site to https://www.fanfiction.net/ and has stolen my profiles and intellectual property.
Click “I am not a robot” and then “Report webspam”
Report more by clicking the link on: Go back to the webspam report form.


These thieves must be stopped!!!!! The more of us who report them, the more likely we can make it happen. I've already reported every single site and I hope you do too.


I'd like to thank the amazing lilbreck and the OP, wildrhov, on tumblr who alerted me to this travesty.

EXTREMELY USEFUL ADDED INFO courtesy of the fabulous feliciacraft:

Note that reporting the sites to Google will only serve to remove them from Search results and other Google products. It does not actually remove your content from the offending sites. (To do that, you’ll need to serve a DMCA complaint to the websites themselves, and file one at Google as well. I’ll do another post tonight to cover that once I've got RL stuff out of the way to look into this.)

That said, spam reporting to Google as outlined above is definitely good. A few tips for filing the report:

1) Include a WEB PAGE URL (e.g. than fiction.org/foo/bar), IN ADDITION to the DOMAIN (e.g. thanfictiong.org) in your report, along with the description that the offending site is illegally SCRAPING CONTENT from a reputable site. It helps if you include the SAME webpage URL at fanfiction.net that shows this as evidence.

2) If possible, include a SEARCH QUERY that will return the URL you’re reporting as a search result. This demonstrates user impact to Google.

3) Do not visit those sites! They reportedly serve up malware galore.

To see if you are impacted, use Google search with the "site" restriction like:

" site:"

For example, to search for stories under my name at talkfictions.com, I would type:

feliciacraft site:talkfictions.com

If the search results include one or more of your stories, then you're impacted.

Spread the word, I bet these sites won't stop at fanfiction. net...

Comments

[crucis01.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! I found my stories on talkfiction. When I tried to check the others, search would not work but lots of malware. My antivirus was running so all is good. I, for one, appreciate your warning and have made a report.

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

These sites are insidious... hope all our reporting has some impact!

[crucis01.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed. I'm not a great writer, but these are still mine, good, bad or meh!

[borgmama1of5.livejournal.com]

Talkfiction has my stuff too! Will report per instructions!

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

Great, the more the merrier!

[ramblin_rosie]

This is strange... checking all the sites via Bing, I get one result from a "Just In" page and a couple of profiles that have one or more of my stories favorited, but evidently *not* any of the stories themselves. Here's hoping sufficient reports will shut these creeps down before they get around to actually stealing my work!

[amberdreams.livejournal.com]

That's good - I didn't check farther than the fact they'd lifted the whole drabble community from ff, so have a ton of my drabbles. It's not so much the reposting without permission that bothers me, but that these sites suck unsuspecting people in to read, and bugger up their computers as a result. And maybe steal data too.