So... Content Theft (again) (Patreon)

I have wanted to post about this for a while and just haven't taken the time to do so. I almost posted this when I was writing the "Hitcher Slut" story, but I was so busy writing that I was usually too drained and tired after writing all day that I didn't feel like writing a post. :P

Anyway...

A few of my wonderful Patrons brought something to my attention when my DropBox account got blocked a while back. Most of the "theft" of my content that is going on is not actually being done by my fans. What I mean by that is the following: there is a not a person logging in, downloading my content, and then reposting it on another site. I am sure that there are still some people doing that, and I would really appreciate it if you would stop should one of you happen to be reading this. :)

The main source of pirating now is something called, "Scraping". There are all sorts of different kinds of scraping, but basically it comes down to a bot or program that logs in and automatically downloads all of your content. You have to have a valid Patreon account to do this, and they must be a paid member of my Patreon Page.

However, the bot automatically logs in and downloads all of your posts once they have a valid account. Again, you can do this multiple ways, but basically they copy an exact duplicate of your post and then repost it to their own website. There is basically an entire website dedicated to doing exactly this for all of Patreon, duplicating a significant portion of the site and putting it out there for free.

No, I am not going to tell you the URL for the website. Sorry! :)

Weirdly, Patreon refuses to do anything about this. I don't know, maybe they can't. Or maybe they just don't think it's worth the time and money that it would take to fight this. However, tons of artists are having their content stolen on the daily while Patreon sits on their hands and does nothing about it.

It's kind of frustrating. :/

But this is ultimately why some artists have moved toward not posting on Patreon itself. They post a message to say that new content is available, but then the content is sent via DM, Discord, or email. That way there is nothing to scrape from the post itself - it's just text.

Keep in mind that as soon as you include a URL (such as DropBox) or any files attached to the actual post (like ZIPs and PDFs), then all of that automatically gets replicated by the scraper. So they only real way to avoid scraping is to not include content in your posts, as I described earlier.

I am not sure what I want to do about this. We've talked about this before, and I've put up polls about it. Most of you (over 50%) would prefer to not have to go through additional steps to acquire my content such as DMs, joining my Discord, or receiving content via email. And I get it, I do. I can't stand websites that "needlessly" complicate what I have to do to actually use the site.

However, I feel like I am going to have to take some form of action at some point. Hopefully, I won't lose a bunch of you when I do. :)