What the hell?

[Deleted member 146224]

What website?
I don't see any links to what we're talking about.

It was an aggregator website sucking everything from RR. Links were probably removed to not give them any more attention.

 

[Lysander_Works]

Yikes.
I have things on RR myself. Aggregators are huge scams anyway.
Is there anything I can do to report them or something, even if I wasn't targeted? I tend to take sites that do that personally.

 

[TsumiHokiro]

What website?
I don't see any links to what we're talking about.

It's been removed by a mod.

 

[AYM]

They surprisingly credited the actual authors ??

 

[Notadate]

I find it a trophy that my stuff has gotten up there, but it was like top 20 in a tag sooo

 

[Vnator]

What website?
I don't see any links to what we're talking about.

I mean Scribblehub, as in the one you're looking at this forum post from. Though another person mentioned it's actually getting its content by skimming from Royal Road.

 

[Lysander_Works]

So I assume some technology or A.I. equivalent can just vast scan published works. I wonder though why there is any particular reason why Royal Road is the main target? Is is merely just random? Does Royal Road lack a certain protection other sites might have? I'm mostly curious at this point.

 

[prognastat]

So I assume some technology or A.I. equivalent can just vast scan published works. I wonder though why there is any particular reason why Royal Road is the main target? Is is merely just random? Does Royal Road lack a certain protection other sites might have? I'm mostly curious at this point.

It's not really a matter of protection. If the text of the work can be accessed using a browser it can be scraped for content using pretty simple programs for such purposes.

It's probably part of the reason why WN tried to make it so you could only access their novels from the app rather than through the website.

What WN does is that they request take downs of URLs from search engines for their contracted novels to make the places hosting them harder to find.

So you can't really blame RR for having their content scraped as that's not really something they can do about it. It would be like and author being mad at a library because anyone that borrows books from the library can scan the books and print copies. That's not really the libraries fault, just the one using it inappropriately.

As an aside if somehow a website could prevent this scraping it would also effectively make your novel impossible to find using third party search engines since those use similar methods to index webpages so it wouldn't just be upsides even if it were possible.

 

[Lysander_Works]

It's not really a matter of protection. If the text of the work can be accessed using a browser it can be scraped for content using pretty simple programs for such purposes.

It's probably part of the reason why WN tried to make it so you could only access their novels from the app rather than through the website.

What WN does is that they request take downs of URLs from search engines for their contracted novels to make the places hosting them harder to find.

So you can't really blame RR for having their content scraped as that's not really something they can do about it. It would be like and author being mad at a library because anyone that borrows books from the library can scan the books and print copies. That's not really the libraries fault, just the one using it inappropriately.

As an aside if somehow a website could prevent this scraping it would also effectively make your novel impossible to find using third party search engines since those use similar methods to index webpages so it wouldn't just be upsides even if it were possible.

So pretty much it isn't avoidable, and perhaps RR because of luck or randomness.

 

[prognastat]

So pretty much it isn't avoidable, and perhaps RR because of luck or randomness.

Yeah. I'm no huge fan of RR, but this particular thing isn't their fault. At least not as long as they want their novels to be accessible from the website rather than forcing their users to read it all through their own proprietary app.(even then it is still potentially possible to steal the content, would just require a lot more effort which most of the places scraping the content wouldn't be either capable of or willing to invest)