So, I actually had to deal with this guy myself like two weeks ago! If you noticed all the Tapas pages of WTL from "Boy in the Bubble" onwards vanish along with this entire blog, that is why.
It put a real big dent in my schedule for pages too, because I didn't want to upload anything new while someone was actively looking to take it for themselves. It also took the wind out of my sails for making new pages at all. I'm getting back to it now, thankfully, but it still wasn't a great feeling to deal with.
If you go to that account now, my comic pages are gone, but that was only after I went through a series of ridiculous steps to make that happen. I'm hoping that maybe telling people what happened will help them get their stuff taken down too.
As a summary of the pure bs I had to go through:
Someone tagged me in my Discord server telling me that they had found pages of chapter two of the comic on TikTok under a different account than my actual TikTok page. Currently my uploads on TikTok stop at "Check-In", because my comic really isn't formatted for that app and the views were very inconsistent. Plus its just a hassle to update there lmao
I had noticed there was a lot of new subs and server members over the past two weeks, and now I knew why. They were likely being funneled very indirectly from this account.
Well, when I found time to take a look for myself, I had been blocked already! The comment my gf made saying "Hey this is so and so's comic and you can read it here," was also gone!
Looking around on my side account I could see that they had stolen other comics as well; @pink-onyx-au and @su-revived stood out to me because I know those two creators personally. I knew C4 just... didn't have an account at all and that Mod Joe had complained in the past about someone stealing his comic, which is prolly what led him to making an account and posting pages himself since he hadn't been posting them previously. I had assumed that all got dealt with but clearly not cause this guy is still here taking stuff π
Anyway, I found out that before they were stealing Tapas comics (and yes it just Tapas - I'll come back to that in a second) they were running a failed Roblox page! Turns out if you do a Google search of their username, it has some extra metadata attached that isn't visible on TikTok-
If you look up that other username- oh wow look a TikTok account that posts Roblox content!
And if you look up that name on Roblox, oh boy there is indeed an account with a matching player avatar there too!
So, since they blocked me on the SU account, I then tried to message the Roblox one.
I genuinely didn't care that they were uploading my pages. Plenty of people have asked to translate my comics and post them and I've said yes. Hell, if any of you reading this wants to do that, here's the Goggle Drive link to all the blank pages and resources to do so. I don't need clock app clout, if I gave a shit I'd still be posting pages myself.
I did care that they were actively taking credit for them and refusing to let readers have full free access to my comic by removing any comment saying where to read the whole thing.
They pretty much just ignored me when I messaged them and then blocked me, but notably, they also blocked my alt on that account too after blocking it on the SU one, which is how I know the account belongs to them given that I never at any point used my alt to contact them about the comic pages.
After exhausting any normal means of communication to ask nicely, "Hey can you please add credit to those uploads or literally just a Tapas link", I decided enough was enough. I went and filed a copywrite takedown form (and as a certified commie queer and copywrite law hater this pained me) and asked my server to leave comments on as many videos as they could saying who created the comic and where to read it. I then privated this blog and changed every upload on Tapas that they hadn't posted yet to be an image saying to come to my server to read the rest. Anyone who had actually been reading up to that point could still get past the security question just fine, so I wasn't worried about locking out any readers.
If this guy was that hell bent on taking my stuff, I wasn't gonna make it easy.
About 24 hours later, after blocking several of my serve members and deleting probably dozens of comments, all my pages magically vanished. Whether my report spooked them or they got miffed by the total shutdown of their source for pages with a very clearly targeted message attached or they just got sick of deleting comments, I don't know. But if putting them on blast it what it takes for them to start doing the bare minimum, so be it.
I wasn't aware they were making attempts to monetize the uploads. That's prolly why they're so determined to do this. If this account gets outted at any point for NOT being the sole source of these comics, they lose money. And the reason they're taking from Tapas is likely because not a lot of people are familiar with the platform. If something is on Twitter, that is super easy to source, but an app exclusively for reading web comics on, not so much. And I know they're only stealing from Tapas because A) privating my tumblr didn't stop them, in fact they actually made a new post about 10 minutes after I privated it with more of my comic, and B) they seemingly stopped posting Ponyx pages where the Tapas comic ends, even though the blog has plenty of content past that point.
Long story short, this guy is a grifter through and through. They had the chance to sit and talk with me like a rational human and instead opted to be shady and dismissive, so my sympathy is gone. Fuck 'em
