You've probably caught wind of this, and blogposts like Alexstrazsa's and PP's do a better job of explaining it, but I'll give a quick summary. A scam website called eBooks Tree has scraped a bunch of eBook and fanfics, uploaded them to their website without author permission, and is using them as a hook to phish credit card info. ("If you wanna download some of these books, just give us your CC number, and we promise we won't charge you, unless you upgrade to the premium package..." That sort of crap.)

In seeing people report this issue, there do seem to be some trends. For instance, Pony Fiction Vault seems to have been scraped.

If you are a member of this group, and especially if you participated in the Just Over The Horizon writeoff from Oct 11th 2004, you may want to search that site for your works. At least 3-4 individuals have reported that their "Just Over The Horizon" entry is available on that website in epub format.

As the other blogposts inform, you are fully within your right to request them to takedown the work, even if it's "just" fanfiction. Check the linked blogposts above for details on how to file a DMCA complaint with the website and request your works be removed from their site.

4274814

Already sent them the complaint. It seems like they really did grab every story from that contest, or at least most of them.

October 11th, 2004?

You guys were writing about MLP:FIM a whole 7 years before it came out?

I found a few by simply searching for "horizon". No doubt there's more, though.
Silent Strider
Baal Bunny
Horizon

They also got the ones from the Transformation Horror event from October 2013, but that doesn't affect many folks. I only mention it to point out that there are earlier Writeoffs that they grabbed from.

4274862
Get on my level.

4274814
What link are you clicking on to see phishing stuff?

The box beneath the story covers that has download/read online appears to have legitimate copies; I didn't have to fill anything out to see them.

I think the phishing thing is an ad.

But yes, they scraped everything from Just Over the Horizon.

4275026
I can't actually find the link in question anymore, but it was definitely up last night. Like for instance, if I searched for a fic that definitely doesn't exist on their site (e.g. Better Batter Bitter), last night there was a link like "register here to get premium access for more stories". Today it's not there.

There's a big fanout of information right now, with a lot of people filing DMCA requests, so the site owners might've disabled the more dubious site features due to all the pressure.

4275058
Ah, I see.

Well, I'm sure they're going to be really happy when they get a bunch of DMCA notices, though really, if anyone wanted to really screw them, they'd notify the folks whose textbooks are up on there. They're much more likely to sue.

4274814

and especially if you participated in the Just Over The Horizon writeoff from Oct 11th 2004

Pav pls

4275217

I searched for my entry and didn't get anything. Anyone has any idea how they parse our username in an "author name"? Like mine for example: M1Garand8, what do they parse it into? Do they just assign a random name?

4277336
My author name was listed as "PavFeira" without a space, which exactly matched what I'm listed as on Roger's site.

However, I sent my DMCA request yesterday, just for my own fic. I didn't receive any email reply from them, but when I search now, it looks like my story was removed. Additionally, I searched for a few others from "Just Over the Horizon" and cannot find them anymore, either. Past Sins is gone. CiG's stories are gone... They might've just summarily removed all horsewords from their site? D-Did we win?

*starts rolling out his George W Bush Mission Accomplished banner*

4277833 Looks like mine is gone too, and I was too lazy to actually send out a DMCA. (They snagged one of mine from Archive of Our Own.)

4277833 When you start getting hundreds of DMCA complaints, backing down is really your only option.

Interesting (and sad, and stupid). They definitely did it by scraping the writeoff site.

Here's their version of The Dragon's Riddle. I clicked on the "Download -> TXT" link underneath the cover graphic, and it redirected me to http://writeoff.me/fic/546-The-Dragons-Riddle.txt .

4278579
Yay free advertising

We don't appear to have a robots.txt on the Writeoff site. Then again, I believe it was reported that Ebooks Tree has been ignoring that txt file. And besides, Ebooks Tree was at one point hosting published stuff like Harry Potter (looks like that's gone now too), so they're clearly not sticklers for the rules anyway.

AO3 apparently did something to their site which blocked Ebooks Tree from linking to it / crawling it. Hard to say what exactly they did, but in theory if Roger did the same thing, it could block concerns in the future. But what they did, your guess is as good as mine.