I'll pull all the information on your stories for you

[MelissaBaby]

If you went to your comments and then ignored the anonymous ones (or added them up) and went through to the User Names, you could then see the information that that user provided to Literotica. I'm sure if he had access to your login, which NOBODY is proposing or suggesting, a script like that could do the same for all the users who follow you or favorited your stuff.

THANK YOU!

So, just the same info we always had, just added up.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Of course I understand. I'm just telling you how it could be done, easily. I'd be fucking angry as well if someone fed my stories into a GTP or similar model without my consent.

I think I might be in two different response loops, but they're a mobius strip, intertwined. I think I'll come back later, and figure out what different people are saying/clarifying/whatever.

 

[Defluer]

THANK YOU!

So, just the same info we always had, just added up.

You're welcome! No need for the aforementioned blow-job either, I'm sure yours are great and all, so no offense. Save it for somebody you love, then tell them, "That was from a guy on the internet!"





As for some of the rest of you... I kinda know what it was like in Salem Massachusetts now. Everyone has their torches and pitchforks out already, somebody is GONNA GET BURNED! Who sneezed? FUCKING DIE!

But I'm done here for the day, or the week, or fuck with how agitated I am... Maybe forever.

 

[8letters]

Am I going to have to give somebody a blowjob just to find out where that information is?

Here you go:

 

[lovecraft68]

You're welcome! No need for the aforementioned blow-job either, I'm sure yours are great and all, so no offense. Save it for somebody you love, then tell them, "That was from a guy on the internet!"





As for some of the rest of you... I kinda know what it was like in Salem Massachusetts now. Everyone has their torches and pitchforks out already, somebody is GONNA GET BURNED! Who sneezed? FUCKING DIE!

But I'm done here for the day, or the week, or fuck with how agitated I am... Maybe forever.

Bad analogy, no one in Salem was a witch or did anything wrong which is why the term witch hunt was coined.
8letters very recently was caught stealing from another author's story without consent.
Good intentions or not, the suspicion here is not unwarranted.

 

[MelissaBaby]

You're welcome! No need for the aforementioned blow-job either, I'm sure yours are great and all, so no offense. Save it for somebody you love, then tell them, "That was from a guy on the internet!"

I think it would be hot if the husband got a blowjob from a guy on the internet, but he is such a stick in the mud.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Here you go:

Thanks. I get it now, and appreciate the work you put into this.

 

[8letters]

Maybe I'm in a circularity here. Having just read BonoBeowolf's post, it may be that 8L was referring to some hypothetical script, not his own. Some clarification would be useful here, given the odd statement.

Correct. Several time, stories have been copied en masse from Literotica to another web site. The people who did that used gerbils much like mine. If I made my gerbils available, it'd make it much easier for the next person to do another mass copy.

If this is an attempt to apologise for the plagiarism bust, it would be more meaningful, I think, to make a report such as this available through the site (which would mean working with the site, not just lifting content from the site), rather than as some private service.

Do I think Literotica should provide this information? Absolutely. In fact, I wish they would provide a lot more information that what I'm able to put together. But they don't, and they have been very, very slow to add new features. And they certainly don't need anything from me to be able to start providing this information to authors.

 

[Britva415]

No need for the aforementioned blow-job either

#first to say "Can I have theirs?"

 

[Bramblethorn]

I don't think we need to be coy here. Yes, somebody who wants to rip off Literotica stories can use these methods. [edit: and have already done so, many many times.] But the bad guys already know them and have been using them for years. This is stuff taught in undergrad programming and used for a wide range of applications, there are free resources that will teach it, probably millions of folk already know how to do it. Giving the info on a forum read by a few dozen people, some of whom already know it, isn't the end of the world. (If site admins disagree though, feel free to delete this post, I'm not trying to cause trouble.)

This is called "web scraping". You write a program that accesses the web page, picks out the data you're looking for, finds relevant links to the information that's not on that web page, follow those links, collect that info too. So for things like "gender of commenters" it looks for comments, finds links to the profiles of non-anonymous users, follows those, checks the "gender" field of each page.

To do this, you need to be able to program, or sweet-talk somebody who can. Python is a pretty popular language for this kind of thing and you can find Python tutorials that will give you the basics. Search for something like "python web scraping beautiful soup". (Beautiful Soup is a package designed to help with reading web pages.)

If you're doing this, be considerate. Excessive automated requests are rude, and could get you blocked from the site if the admins take exception to what you're doing. Test your code so you don't end up accidentally creating an infinite loop that will hammer Literotica forever, and check https://www.literotica.com/robots.txt for a list of things your code should avoid doing. (The robots.txt file is basically an "automated scrapers, please don't touch these things" request, which reputable folk will honour; for Literotica it's mostly things like voting on stories, posting comments, and so on, which for obvious reasons should only be done by humans.) Don't run it too often, especially for big jobs.

Please note: I am not volunteering to give more guidance on this than what I've posted above. Not for ethical reasons, I just don't have the time and I'm not a crash-hot programmer anyway. This stuff isn't rocket science but if you're new to programming there's a bit to learn before you'll be able to run your own scraper, and I'm not a good person to teach it. Requests for tech support on this will be ignored.

 

[Bramblethorn]

You do understand this would be copyright infringement, correct? Even if you are doing it for purposes of aggregating and processing information rather than for republication, it's still copyright infringement, because you are reproducing copyrighted works within the meaning of section 106 of the Copyright Act.

I think that was 8letters' point, a reason for why he didn't offer to share the script.

 

[KeithD]

I don't understand. What is worth anything to swipe other than story content, which can be swiped just by copying and pasting?

The stats are pretty much worthless to anyone because they are constructed from sand.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Correct. Several time, stories have been copied en masse from Literotica to another web site. The people who did that used gerbils much like mine. If I made my gerbils available, it'd make it much easier for the next person to do another mass copy.

Thanks. Your clarification is appreciated. I'd misconnected separate comments.

 

[KeithD]

Thanks. Your clarification is appreciated. I'd misconnected separate comments.

Again, why does anyone have to use gerbils to collect anything of value from this site? All they have to do is cut and paste the stories. The story content is all that has any value here. The rest is built on slippery premise.

 

[SimonDoom]

I think that was 8letters' point, a reason for why he didn't offer to share the script.

My point is that it's still infringement even if it's just him using the script, isn't it?

 

[SimonDoom]

Again, why does anyone have to use gerbils to collect anything of value from this site? All they have to do is cut and paste the stories. The story content is all that has any value here. The rest is built on slippery premise.

Because not everybody agrees with you about the worthlessness of the data. I understand your point, but it's a point that's been debated as long as I've been on this forum and you're not going to convince everyone.

 

[lovecraft68]

The importance of stats varies from person to person, and although I'm more in the company of the not caring much about them, I get to some they're a bigger deal.
But this is just absurd. Is this that much better than just downloading the report lit provides to us? Do we really need to 'scrape' the site in the event there were an extra 5 votes on your story you didn't know about?

To quote Ace Ventura, Obsess much? Much too Much.

 

[KeithD]

Because not everybody agrees with you about the worthlessness of the data. I understand your point, but it's a point that's been debated as long as I've been on this forum and you're not going to convince everyone.

What's debatable? Are you suggesting that voluntarily provided "information" on Literotica is all accurate? Don't be silly.

 

[lovecraft68]

Because not everybody agrees with you about the worthlessness of the data. I understand your point, but it's a point that's been debated as long as I've been on this forum and you're not going to convince everyone.

I often wonder if his tune would change if he had stats-other than quantity of stories-worth talking about.

 

[KeithD]

Because without scraping you'd need a near infinite number of PhD copy and pasting students, who aren't making you coffee all the time, to compile this kind of thing.

https://pile.eleuther.ai/

That's 825 GiB of online conversations, film scripts and stories, upon which you can train a GTP conversational AI or similar.

What kind of thing? What has actual usefulness on Literotica other than the content of the stories, which can (and are) easily taken by cut and paste?

 

[KeithD]

You scrape say 100,000 Literotica stories into one of these big data sets, like The Pile, and then feed then feed that data set to an AI (yum yum). Then it regurgitates as it's 'own' stories in response the user's input and questions.

Scraping is automated and way quicker than human copy-pasting.

Get it now? It's non-human high speed plagiarism.

Your stories have probably been scraped into one of those data sets and spat out by a GTP or similar. How's that make you feel?

Why, when you can just copy and paste them? Folks here are playing whack-a-mole with other folks stealing their stories and putting them up for pay somewhere or to give bulk to some other site for sponsorship. But it's just whack-a-mole. It doesn't stop it from happening. And the thief doesn't have to do any of that fancy work. All she/he needs do is copy/paste from the site.

The effort the thief has to put into this is repackaging and posting of the product. That isn't affected by any this fancy stuff I see being discussed here.

 

[alohadave]

Why, when you can just copy and paste them? Folks here are playing whack-a-mole with other folks stealing their stories and putting them up for pay somewhere or to give bulk to some other site for sponsorship. But it's just whack-a-mole. It doesn't stop it from happening. And the thief doesn't have to do any of that fancy work. All she/he needs do is copy/paste from the site.

The effort the thief has to put into this is repackaging and posting of the product. That isn't affected by any this fancy stuff I see being discussed here.

No one is copying and pasting. The task is trivial with programs. In the time it takes you to copy and paste one story, the script can do dozens, with full metadata.

 

[KeithD]

No one is copying and pasting. The task is trivial with programs. In the time it takes you to copy and paste one story, the script can do dozens, with full metadata.

I laughed at the suggestion that no one copies and pastes stories from here.

Yes, I know that what some of you are focused on is the metadata. The metadate at Literotica is a pile of shit. This is a porn site. People aren't giving enough accurate information on anything for it to be worth anything. There isn't enough voting and commenting to mean anything statistically. People have multiple accounts, so there's no meaningful data to come from that. Control over views and rating is so loose there's no meaningful data there. Those of you trying to make something meaningful out of the stats you can pull from here are zooming around in the clouds. You also aren't being scientific. Premises have to be grounded.

 

[KeithD]

Well, this pursuit of stats that give you a thrill certainly is a way of avoiding writing much.

 

[Bramblethorn]

My point is that it's still infringement even if it's just him using the script, isn't it?

Only if he's republishing those stories. Not if it's just about compiling stats etc.