sepiapages

Just gonna use this space to yap a little bit about my little writer hopes and dreams (because god knows actual consistent motivation to write vanishes at the worst times) and hopefully find some other people to yap with lol

At the moment I'm very slowly kind of piecing together this (what I hope to be) big and long and complicated story — been calling it my mobium fic because it started as me thinking about how mobiumshipping is cool but it's basically exclusively total AUs, so how could I get them all together in canon? And came up with something I think is really neat. Not entirely sure if it will be romantic though; gotta be honest, I'm leaning toward no?? It feels like more people would read it if it were romantic, but... y'know, plenty of people are doing romantic fics. Maybe it'll be fine if I try to do something a little unique? They're crazy about each other <3 no romo <3 just soulmates <3

Attempt at a succinct premise under the cut

Leaving a comment on a fic provides compounding delight. Authors will love initially receiving a comment, will love later recalling this and that particular aspect of a comment, and they will love rereading comments and being reminded how readers enjoyed the work.

Comments are not a one-time act of kindness and consideration. They keep giving.

See that bit at the bottom? Don't do that. Insert ParamedicGuy.gif going "Don't."

Other malicious spam comments I've gotten seemed designed to make an author question their writing, or outright encourage them to delete their stories from AO3. This one is different, in that it tries to get you to destroy the work on your own computer.

If you ran that command, it basically locates your Documents folder, then deletes everything in it, including all subfolders. It also does it without any prompt, so you have no chance to second guess your actions.

This is just fucking trolling.

Coincidentally, we just did training on a cyberattack similar to this, called a ClickFix attack. You can read about how that works here.

As a general rule, if ANYONE or ANY WEBSITE tells you unsolicited* to do anything in Powershell, CMD RUN, command prompt, shell command, or something similar, DON'T.

*There are legit reasons for running commands in PowerShell or the command prompt, but in those cases you are likely seeking out a solution to a problem you are already experiencing. Don't just run random commands on your computer as recommended by some unlogged-in guest on a fan fiction site.

Always think and consider before taking action, and get a second opinion from a trusted source. When I got this comment I was pretty sure what the command would do, and it took me about three seconds of googling to confirm it.

Here's a bit of a further breakdown for the ones curious about what the hell this command does.

What you're basically telling your PC if you ran this is "go into this folder (Documents) and then Recursively (for all sub-folders) Remove (delete) all files therein Forcefully (without any user input and also if a file was locked)."

The little "Exclude *.archiveofourown" they tack in there is just honestly absolutely diabolical if you don't know what you're looking at.

As an inexperienced user, you'll think "oh of course, exclude ao3, that's what I want!"

*.archiveofourown is a file ending, including any file title.

There are not archiveofourown files.

This is telling your PC to ignore files that don't exist.

Honestly, the gall of these trolls is astounding.

DO NOT DO THIS.

And as a further alarm bell, even if a well-meaning anon came to your comments to warn you:

why has ao3 not put out this warning officially?

this command is for Windows users. WHAT ABOUT ALL THE PEOPLE WHO USE MAC OR LINUX?

I woke this this morning to this comment left on one of my fics

I was half asleep so it took me a bit to realise that this is a scammer.

It seems that scammers have learn from their obvious tells in the past.

Previously, scammers would leave vague comments from guest accounts before asking if you’d like to commission some art from them.

Now, it seems like they are starting to create AO3 accounts and are feeding either fic or tags into an AI to pump out a summary before offering the commission.

Here’s the scammer’s profile. Note the description (which seems to be the same for every account posting these comments) and the recent join date.

I received another comment this evening for the exact same scam, just a different profile.

This is a reminder! These are scams preying on the desire to have your fic illustrated and will not deliver! They will either take your money and run or give you something AI generated and will not accept any refunds!

Remember to block and report these comments so the abuse team can stop these scammers in their tracks!