A couple of years ago, I issued an appeal to readers in other communities regarding a prolific plagiarist known as "Broken Promises" (that was one of her aliases) asking readers to help identify stories they recognized.

I realize that some may not want people to know they're reading "x reader" stories (guilty pleasures - we all have them). So I invite you to me here on DA, or to PM HorusTheAvenger, LadyRainFeather, The Warty Hogg, Jeremy Hillary Boob, O Long Johnson, A Wild Tapir, or Mkis on Fanfiction.net if you recognize any of the content that we haven't yet identified. The quicker we can identify it, the quicker we can get notices out to the actual authors of these works so they can file claims of authorship with Fanfiction.net administration in order to have the works removed.

I respect that you may want to keep your information private - simply let us know that you don't want us to mention who the report came from and we will note "anonymous report received". We do this regularly, and we're happy to have help in combating plagiarism.

At this time, the account list and information on what's been identified (or links to other threads) can be found here:

AO3/DA to FFN Mass Plagiarism Master Thread

Right now, we know that there are 344 accounts being used by this person to plagiarise authors across multiple sites.

We don't know yet why this person has decided to focus on the "x reader" community. Largely that's where the stolen content has been taken from, though they do branch out on occasion (usually with Harry Potter and the Hermione-sue-phenomenon).

And I know you're all thinking that it won't do any good because Fanfiction.net isn't so great about responding to reports.

I have a solution for that.

We have a template at TAPIR that I will provide to all of the original authors. It needs to be sent to a specific e-mail to have this matter resolved. I will happily provide you that information so the stolen content can be removed.

So if you have any information, please let us know. You're welcome to post directly in that Master Thread if you have an account on Fanfiction.net.

Please help spread the word.

You can "reblog" and link people here if you want to post your own journal about it. I don't mind. I'd also really appreciate s on this notice so that the visibility metric will kick in and hopefully get this more exposure. The more people that know about this, the better the chances we have of getting the matter resolved quickly.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and for any help you might be able to provide in advance.

~RogueMudblood

P.S. - Please do NOT flame or harass this person in any way. While I do know how it feels to have your writing stolen, we don't want to engage in any activity of that sort. Getting the word out so we can identify the pieces and get in touch with the original authors will help tremendously, so if we focus our efforts on that rather than attacking this individual, we'll be far more productive in resolving this matter.

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Update 16 July:

Ladies and Gentlemen!

We have some brilliant news! The admins of Fanfiction.net have started to ban the accounts posting the stolen stories! While this is far from over, we know that, as of right now, they have banned fifteen (15) accounts!

If you haven't had a chance yet to get your report in, I urge you to do so. I truly hope we can get this resolved by the end of the day, especially since this person was active on one of the accounts within the last two hours, while the banning is taking place.

Thank you all for your help in reporting this issue, spreading the word of this issue, and letting everyone in the community know what's happening while remaining civil and mature. It's a credit to the DA community that no one from this site outright attacked the thief accounts. The same can't be said of users on FFN. I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate the exercise of decorum in spite of the horrible act that's been perpetrated.

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Update 19 July:

Fifty accounts down....

Three hundred and three to go. It might seem like a daunting task, but I'm confident that as long as the original authors send in the complaints to the e-mail addresses provided that this can be resolved. I know that Xing is certainly taking the fact that the e-mails went unanswered seriously - I can now vouch for e-mails from three employees from FanFiction.net whereas before I was only able to confirm that they ever had two employees (including the owner, in both cases).

That said, I strongly recommend not even contacting her. She's made it clear that despite statements to the contrary, she has no intention of removing the stolen works. (Seriously, I added all of the confirmed stolen postings to a C2 on FFN - which is a public list. The author gets an e-mail telling them it's been added in. So she got a lot of e-mails from the FFN bot [382, for the ones not deleted by the admins there] - if she has a valid e-mail on file - pointing out exactly which stories she needs to remove. And yet, nothing has been done.)

Having mentioned all of the above

there are still numerous stories we haven't identified. Some of them are very clearly stolen. It is possible that the original was removed from the web. We identified a few like that.

Even if your work is no longer online, you do have recourse to having the stolen content removed. As long as you have the original file in which it was created (always write in a word processing program and not in a text editor. Always.), you'll be able to send the needed information to file the complaint and prove it was yours. So if any of the stolen stories that aren't identified belong to you, please feel free to note me. I'll walk you through the steps of getting the stolen content down.

Anyone having trouble with getting a pilfered story removed from FFN is welcome to me here or PM me on FFN and - to the best of my ability - I will help. I'm not a machine though, so please do give me some time to answer. I haven't forgotten about you just because I don't answer for a day or two.

Thank you to everyone who's been helping - 

as this is most assuredly a group effort, and getting it resolved is going to be a group effort as well. I do appreciate greatly all of the time and energy being invested into getting the stolen content removed from Fanfiction.net.