The Blog Pages of Kellan Meig'h

It started very innocuously ...

This all happened on a forum that I belong to, just to set the tone for ya -

A new poster to this forum did the classic "Wall Of Text" by posting a story via a thread on the main section of the forum. they added a poll for us to express our feelings about the story.

I started to read it but had to stop several times due to "Wall Of Text" induced eye strain. I kept thinking to myself, "I have read this story somewhere before." By the way, the poster gave a link to the story on Scribd.com, where they had uploaded this story to.

I guess I should state that this was an incomplete story that the poster alluded to completing either by the original author or they would complete it, if enough interest could be generated.

Those people that read the thread on the forum warned the poster that completing the story w/o the original author's permission was treading on thin ice. Those warnings were answered by some very angry responses.

By this point, one member posted that he stopped reading the story. The poster asked why. The member stated it was boring. The poster typed/said, "How much did you read? The first sentence?" It was out of hand by now.

Meanwhile, I found the original author and got the straight scoop. The story wasn't abandoned as suggested by the poster. It was a filler for a magazine called American Journal of Anthropomorphism. Apparently there wasn't enough illustrations to fill 128 pages of the magazine so he used his story as a filler in issues #1 through 3. By Issue #4, they had 128 pages of illustrations and didn't need it. Issue #5 wasn't printed due to issues with the publisher. He wasn't amused by the theft of his story, unfinished or not.

Back at the forum, the admin/moderator had had enough of this person's arrogance. He locked the thread and issued a warning that further abuse, etc. would result in the "Fall Of The Banhammer." OK, problem solved, right? Nope.

The poster starts a new thread, using the admin's name for the thread name, and calls him out. No shit. I cringed even before I opened the thread to see what had been typed.

In the largest font possible, the poster pretty much told off the admin. I won't go into specifics (those of you that know him can ask him directly) but yeah, as you can guess, the banhammer dropped. Account deleted, posts deleted. It was deserving.

The owner of the story went to Scribd.com and had the story removed due to DCMA violations. Good show.

According to the admin in question, this person tried several times on our forum to drum up support for this story. Why they just didn't finish it w/o permission, I don't know. Why they didn't contact the original author (which took me all of 5 minutes to locate, btw) is beyond me.

Anyway, there's your little piece of drama for the week.

Slainte Mhath,

Kellan, the old warhorse