New one-shot story: Autoapproval Was A Mistake
Added 2021-09-25 02:02:27 +0000 UTCI swear it's not meta.
...I swear it's not all that meta...
This was inspired by something which happened on the site yesterday. We had a plagiarist, and they were proud of it. Three stories ripped off across four submissions, because he broke one of them into sections and called it a sequel -- doing so for a story which has 136,000 views.
I didn't typo.
He claimed the author was his friend and had given him permission to post it. Then he started on the rest of the excuse list, got caught on the other submissions, and switched up to full troll boasting. He'd won because he'd upset us, he'd won because he'd wasted people's time, he could be banned and he already had eight alt accounts ready to go -- the works. It didn't matter what anyone else did because he'd won, and he kept telling us that right up until the strikeout mark appeared through his original chosen name. One where the short bio was a rickroll.
How did he get past the moderators, when the first story (and these days, only the first) is always inspected? Best theory is that he wrote a thousand words of something original (or not recognized), waited to get it approved -- then deleted, replaced, and put the other two into the queue. It's a lot of work just to upset people, but trolls generally don't care.
Autoapproval takes a lot of burden away from the site's moderators. But it can be abused: yesterday was just one of the ways in which that can happen. And I thought about Spike, trying to manage the library all by himself, and the sheer level of burden...
14k on the word count.
I swear it's not all that meta.
But if I get a three-day timeout, now you know why.
