When you know a forum is obviously inspired by your own, but different enough that you're probably the only one to see these similarities, what is there to do? Nothing.
But I have to ask. Whatever happened to (yes, I stole a title from down there, and look! here's credit! xD) credit? I mean... when you get help from someone then rip their ideas and tweak them to suit your own board, how is that right?
Isn't that like.. I dunno.. on the verge of stabbing someone in the back?
It really makes me not want to help people anymore. But I know I will. I don't really care as much as I did earlier. The similarities - like I said - are something only I will notice. And y'know. My sites better? xD
I came here totally prepared to make a big huge rant. But I just give up. I've been stolen from countless times and I just don't care.
Steal my stuff.
Your site will die.
Because I put months of work into what I do, you put a day. I have original things, less original after a week, that draws people in. I have a solid member base and activity to begin with because I put that much work into my sites; people want to join them as soon as they hear I'm making one. My sites last a few months to a year or more. I'm a fairly good admin. And I'm sick of being th ebad guy.
I'm sick of being the one to scream 'theft', to have people say 'no, no it's a coincidence' and BS like that. So I'm done. Steal my stuff. Steal my ideas, my layouts, my images, my everything. I don't care.
You know why?
Because no matter what, I will be better than you. My site will survive longer than yours. My members will be loyal, they will like me more than yours like you and I will always have the better reputation. No matter who you are.

I realize this makes me sound really concieted, and I'll probably second guess it after I actually get some sleep, but it's true. To me, right now, this is true. I'm better than people who steal from my site. We all are.

But I still have to ask/tl;dr
IS CREDIT THAT HARD TO GIVE?



ETA; Closer inspection, a stolen code. A small one, but stolen nonetheless.
I am so through with helping people.

I have been stolen from too, and I found the best thing to do is ignore it and not let it bother you so much. Credit ISN'T that hard to give, but chances are they'll deny your site inspired theirs.

I know that I'd never found 'werecats' anywhere before my site. I wanted to avoid werewolves at all costs but my site has shifters and another species was needed. I like cats, so I made werecats.

Few weeks later,some place with vampires, werewolves and werefelines shows up... Coincidence? Possibly. But seeing as most people responded to werecats with 'wtf' expressions, I doubt it.

Oh well. I'll just assume it was coincidence, give them the benefit of the doubt, and continue paying attention to my RP. 'Cause it's my baby.

I've had something like this happen to me a number of times.

Firstly, someone took my old old board, Hogwarts Unleashed, and ripped most of it. THEN they proceeded to send a PM to everyone on my site and ask them to come to their site because it was better than HU. Guess what, everyone left my site...

Secondly, someone ripped some stuff from the old Owen's like our rules verbatim, and a few of our forum descriptions.

The first time, they weren't nice at all. They were rude, crude, and downright unacceptable. I wanted to KICK them. Basically, that marked the downfall of Unleashed. After that, everything went downhill.

The second time, I asked them nicely if they could either credit us for our rules and stuff or get new ones. They were really nice and credited us. :)

I have this happen a lot. xD And HAVE had it happen a lot over the years. Mostly now I just keep my mouth shut because it's not worth the drama and besides--my games have a loyal player base, me and my members put hard work into them, and one's going on 8 years and the other is going on a year.

I know my games will be around for years and years longer while these other games flounder and die. ^_^ That gives me all the satisfaction I need, anymore.

Though it is kinda frustrating when you see a unique feature or concept you came up with spread like wildfire with no credit whatsoever. |: But ah well.

As a vindictive beyotch with a lot of time on her hands, I do everything in my power to bring people who steal my stuff down. If possible, report them. Gather your evidence and present it well. Usually hosts are good about sympathising with you. If you don't want them completely shut down, PM the admin. Call them out. If you're nice about it they'll generally apologize and offer to remove it or, at the very least, credit you. If they're jerks about it, report them. If it's impossible to do anything about it you have to move on -- but I find that doesn't' come up all too often.

Well, I know you guys are frustrated over the credit thing, but I just have one thing to say: be careful not to take it too far against the site. I know you guys may be thinking more along the lines of 'they obviously stole everything!' - but what I get from this thread is that 'wow, that's kind of similar to something I have'...

For example, the werecats thing - I've actually seen it several times before now. Around eight or nine or so while lurking different sites over the years. I've also seen wererats, werebats, werehorses, werezebra, along with many many others. While it was hard to find and come across, it has been thought of before now, and probably will be after right now.

I personally have gotten angry at a site over the possibility of them raising hell because the site I was working on with some others might be considered too close because of one or two things we thought of ourselves. This particular site that had one or two plot similarities with ours, was several years old, and had the main admin as not only a very dramatic person, but she also raised hell and high water over anything that so much as had a similar skin as hers. Basically, once we thought we were almost done we realized... we could not put this out there because this admin would call us out and probably try to delete the board. So, basically we had to start out from scratch because we did not want hell to be risen.

So, what I'm trying to say to you guys is that sometimes those 'original features' are not that original. In fact, most things in roleplaying have probably been thought about and written up before right now and probably will be a lot after right now. It's the exact same with writing, after all.

Basically, in end, with some things, you guys have to accept that sometimes... it may really just be a coincidence.

I should have mentioned this in regards to my vindictive bitchery: in those cases someone has directly stolen graphics I made/photos taken by me/my exact coding. Definitely don't overreact if you're unsure. You'll just look like a jackass.

Yeah, I'm talking things that are obvious, too!

I've had people rip things from me word-for-word, for instance, without permission or credit. x__x Those are of course obvious, and I come down on those and ask for credit/them to remove it, in those cases.

The werecats thing? I agree. That's been around for as long as I've been RPing, which is roughly 11/12 years. x3

As for unique features...ahh, you can tell if someone is copying it. Namely when you release it on your game, haven't seen it in any other games before, and then suddenly, a few days to a week later, you notice that same feature on someone else's' game.

And that someone else had been a member on your game, or is one still. >__>;;

I'm really glad I'm not the only one >.>

I know for a fact all their ideas for their layout came from my site. And I know one code that was copied directly. And I screenshotted everything in case they decide to remove it/change it and complain that they didn't do it.

They're basically trying to clone my site and I don't like that. I wouldn't mind if they hadn't copied one of my codes ;-; But nooo they just had to go and do that and push me off the edge. Though I probably shouldn't have posted in their cbox seeing as though I'm getting blamed for other people responding to it >.> But personally I want it to be public. I'm mean and I like to ruin sites that steal from me.

I honestly don't know whether to be flattered or insulted.

I mean, I'm flattered that half the stuff I make up shows up on another Pokemon RP within a month tops, cause... well, it makes me feel like they were good ideas. No one would bother stealing them if they sucked, right? Looking at it that way helps me feel a little less pissed off that they friggin' took credit for it, but... eh. In the end, I suppose that if their members are happy, I'll survive. It isn't important enough to be a douchebag about, cause even if no one else knows, -I- know that I've indirectly contributed to a fair number of RP sites. :D Plus, I mean, they seem to like stealing my ideas more than making up their own,; if they can't even be assed to improve their OWN FUCKING GAME they'll just die sooner or later.

On the down side... shit, if I wanted to contribute to some of the garbage I've seen, I'd just tell the members to find a better site. Even in the first mindset, it still pisses me off that so many people claim total credit for this stuff - they don't even bother changing it in the least, so they can't use the "inspired by" excuse.

I've pretty much stopped calling people on it, though. I used to be pretty "iron fist" about it if something was obviously stolen (read: copied word for word), but now I just sort of nod and smile and sometimes ask if I can at least get a little "© of Munch" at the bottom, and even then only if it's so blatant and retardedly obvious that it can't be passed off as anything else. The drama that ensues is rarely worth it, cause... well, the site will die within a month.

I don't care enough to let people have their two weeks of fun before they run their site into the ground, then drag it through the muck until their dick falls off.

...I don't let them advertise on my site, though, and if they're dicks about it I tend to permaban them. I may not be able to stop them from stealing shit, but I can make it difficult. Plus, I don't get to ban many people any more. I look forwards to eacch nasty ban message!

Psh. If people want to be dumb enough to steal something I have done, I say let em. It shows they have no originality and no imagination. It's not like I've got anything that's different out there anyway. lol

But I do think you're overreacting a tad. I agree, you're better. Your site has the loyal members. You got more creativity then those idiots, but complaining about it just makes you stoop to their level. Let them screw up on their own.

Besides, not one site is exactly the same. <3

Sometimes it's genuinely a coincidence, and sometimes it's not. Knowing exactly what you're talking about and the site you're talking about, I know that it's not just a coincidence. >>; Did she take more from you than just that piece of code though? Because that's all I know about and in your rant here it seems that you say that she stole more. And I ask here because one, you're not on AIM and two she is being hosted off of my domain and I personally don't want my domain's name dragged through the mud because of one moron.

I can't tell you how often I've been stolen from myself, and really it doesn't bother me so much unless the person literally copies every aspect of my site almost word for word like one other site that will remain unmentioned did to the first version of Perplexity which was then DoS -- the RPG. There wasn't a single aspect of their site that didn't match mine right down to their punctuation. The thing is, this is the internet. The very moment someone comes up with something, someone else will enviably come along and take it, regardless of whether they edit it or not. I guess after making websites for the past almost 11 years now, I've come to realize that it's not really worth getting all worked up over. Especially things that are fairly easy to come up with, no offense, like werecats.

Anyone could have come up with that if you really sit down and think about it. It's not that far fetched to come up with werecats from werewolves. That kind of thing isn't worth getting all pissy over. Especially if you know for a fact that your sites are better than theirs, and especially in this instance yours is much better than hers. You have an extremely active site, and first off she's just starting off, second she left until Monday which is one of the worst things you can do right after you open your site.

She doesn't have much content either if you look, whereas yours is very well explained. I think I asked her like five billion questions about her site and how it works because she never bothered to write anything about it aside from five basic rules and her little plot. And ZR, you were never blamed for other people posting. Read what I wrote you on AIM. >>; I never blamed you for anything.

I simply asked if you could tell people not to spam her cbox. What needs to be said really only needed to be said by you because it was well... enough really for her to get the picture. How is that blaming you for anything? It's not. At least not that I was aware of, now if I'm wrong someone please let me know because that wasn't my intention what so ever.

I know the feeling of having people steal your ideas, even people you wouldn’t have thought would do it. That’s why I go out of my way to learn how to do things someone cannot easily copy. For my RPGs, I create my own skins. From scratch. The color, the design, the backgrounds, the headers, the icons, the markers...every single stitch of the layout, I design and I create myself. It helps that I designed websites before becoming a gamer so it wasn’t that difficult to learn how to skin; it’s the exact same process as building a website from scratch. So, I had an advantage when I decided I no longer wanted a board where everyone could copy my look by going to some skin database and looking it up. It helps my board keep hold of some of its originality and copycats from using the same skin. I can say with utter confidence that the look and style of my board is unique.

As for my rules (for my first and longest running RPG which isn’t listed here), copycat sites may have similar rules, but all they can do is post their version of my rules on their forum in ‘fancy text.’ I formatted my rules into an actual e-book (which I call the our e-handbook ^_^) that people can download and read wherever and whenever. People may try to imitate me, but they can’t do it easily or to the letter.

Now’a’days I watch copycat sites spring up and die within a month or two, its kind of sad really. Most of the time the people who try to copy you fail to realize there’s one thing that they cannot imitate, and that’s the dedication, drive, and actual passion it takes to stick to an RPG when its popular and when it’s not; when it’s thriving and when it’s not. They think an RPG is supposed to remain active constantly...any admin of a long-lasting game knows that there will be periods when activity is high and periods when activity is low...it’s a cycle.

I’m also extremely lucky that I have a core group of members who I know will be continually loyal and supportive of my boards. As long as I'm not losing members to those who steal/imitate my RPG I can't really complain. All I can do is try my best to stay as original as possible and continue to evolve in a way it takes some actual effort than merely copying/pasting to keep up with whatever I do next. After all, if you run a game in a popular fandom/genre someone else is going to want to run their very own version of it eventually.

>_> <_< that's why I said this:

But this is just the most recent example. Way back in the days of wolf RP, I had all the bloody documents in my 'information' section copy and pasted on a site along with stolen graphics and even characters... the site asked to affiliate with me as a 'sister site' which is how I found out about it... Uhh, not the smartest move, but in that instance I DID say something to them about it.

If it's probably just coincidence, I ignore my butthurt and go back to RP.

Nevermind. Count this is a double post. I don't feel like spelling out the truth and bringing more fight to what's already been done just because it's what the truth really is about the situation.