Highlight and Ctrl+C protection

[Drew_the_Ghost]

Been seeing Copycats, taking other authors work and posting them under their name in Webnovel. Even going so far as to plug in their Patreon.
Is there a way to protect the actual content in the novel from being copypasted so blatantly?
Like having the actual story content highlight protected, but if the author needs for readers to copy something, they use the Author Notes feature.
An author I follow had to delete his story from here cause of this, don't want it to keep happening, I like this site.

 

[Agentt]

Just tell that author to man up.

 

[SailusGebel]

No.

 

[melchi]

Been seeing Copycats, taking other authors work and posting them under their name in Webnovel. Even going so far as to plug in their Patreon.
Is there a way to protect the actual content in the novel from being copypasted so blatantly?
Like having the actual story content highlight protected, but if the author needs for readers to copy something, they use the Author Notes feature.
An author I follow had to delete his story from here cause of this, don't want it to keep happening, I like this site.

It is not just webnovel, bots scrub this site and upload it to kindle unlimited. If you search amazon for the genres of your favorite story you'll find some bot uploads. It is a bit disgusting they haven't fixed that yet.

 

[J_Chemist]

Recommend posting up a Place Holder for a day or so prior to uploading to fend off at least the daily scrubbing bots.

 

[Zirrboy]

Highlight protection harms users more than it does scrappers.
Readers would have to be prevented from quoting content, and as long as the text of the chapter is transmitted in text form in some way, it's a 15 minute job to write a script that extracts that, applicable to any story on the same site thereafter. Bots would be entirely unaffected by the change.

 

[Piisfun]

Highlight protection harms users more than it does scrappers.
Readers would have to be prevented from quoting content, and as long as the text of the chapter is transmitted in text form in some way, it's a 15 minute job to write a script that extracts that, applicable to any story on the same site thereafter. Bots would be entirely unaffected by the change.

The only thing that has even a remote effect is making each chapter an image...
And even then, many scraper bots now come with optical character recognition (OCR) to bypass that.

Copy protection won't help. At all.

It is a major issue for digital assets, but unless you can forcibly bind them to the serial number of a piece of physical hardware, you have to constantly fight with the fact that software and files are, by nature, easy to copy and redeploy. That one of their greatest strengths is also their worst weakness.

 

[melchi]

Also, if they changed all the pages to something like a pdf then screen readers might not work.

 

[Cipiteca396]

Write a disclaimer in the chapter that says what sites the story is uploaded to. The bots will copy it. Warn readers that the story is constantly being edited, and if they don't want to miss those edits, they'll need to go to a real website.

If the Patreon link works, it doesn't matter where the reader found it though. That's just more income.

 

[AliceShiki]

Contact the author of the story. The author can send a DMCA claim to Webnovel.

 

[Shamiko]

No there isn't really anything we can do about it.
I do recommend Neovel if u want to prevent this from happening to u tho.
All stories cannot be copy-pasted, so for those bots to be able to steal a story, they would literally have to write word to word in a separate document, which would take them ages, so they probably don't touch that website that much.

 

[Piisfun]

All stories cannot be copy-pasted, so for those bots to be able to steal a story, they would literally have to write word to word in a separate document, which would take them ages, so they probably don't touch that website that much.

document.body.innerText

Copy-paste isn't needed with that tiny line of JavaScript, which returns the contents of the page stripped of all formatting.

The only ways to defeat it are to either post the chapter as an image or embed the text into a second webpage inside the webpage.
And even then, it won't stop the more sophisticated scrapers, which quite litterally "write word to word in a separate document" using Optical character recognition. Never underestimate how fast bots can type.

 

[CadmarLegend]

document.body.innerText

Copy-paste isn't needed with that tiny line of JavaScript, which returns the contents of the page stripped of all formatting.

The only ways to defeat it are to either post the chapter as an image or embed the text into a second webpage inside the webpage.
And even then, it won't stop the more sophisticated scrapers, which quite litterally "write word to word in a separate document" using Optical character recognition. Never underestimate how fast bots can type.

That’s why you use random characters from around the world. Sprinkle in some Japanese, chinese, arabic, some Afrikaans, and perhaps a little bit of English. You then link the user to a CodePen that can decode your chapter. Chances are, the dataset for a language isn’t included for the OCR by default, such as with Tesseract. Pro-gamer move.

I am joking. Don’t do this. The site only accepts English stories. But perhaps decoding a chapter could work, like how many Japanese manga sites will serve the pages of their manga on the fly using scripts instead of literally just putting them in image tags. That would require some fumbling around, though, and seems like too much effort to put in. Either way, a scraper will eventually get the chapter either way.

 

[proxybaba]

you can just post every popular site simultaneously, so they can't paste things that are already present.
I don't know if it works, just the idea I got.

 

[doravg]

That is why I post on Smashwords now. Once you have an ISBN, nobody can steal your stuff. (All of my SH books are stolen by this aggregator which I won't name.)

 

[Nyaa]

I despise sites that implement this and have a browser extension to circumvent it.
I have no doubt the content thieves also have methods for this.

The only thing it does is serve to frustrate legitimate readers and encourage them to actually go read on pirate sites instead if they're more user friendly. I have already done this with some manga translators - opting to read on a pirate site because the translator blocked copying the title and therefore making it a pain to to copy to my list tracking site to update my lists.

I have also stopped reading some novels when the author moves to a less user-friendly site.

Us readers will often copy snippets of the text to quote in comments - sometimes even for the purpose of helping the author find and correct typographical errors.

It is also useful for copying unfamiliar words and terminology to the web search.

I don't think this minor inconvenience for thieves is worth the major frustration for readers.

 

[Notadate]

I’m an asshole. So I become a bigger asshole if someone claims my story. I will spoil the shit out of it. Then will actually upload the true chapter..

 

[Tony]

Sorry but this feature will never be implemented. It does nothing other than give authors a false sense of security while annoying readers.

Bots would just ignore it so it would do nothing to them. As for real users trying to copy chapters, there's addons which would just bypass it too.

 

[Eclectic_Asininity]

Do you guys not rate limit individual IP addresses? I assume that would stop a lot of the scraping.

 

[AliceShiki]

Do you guys not rate limit individual IP addresses? I assume that would stop a lot of the scraping.

IP-based restrictions are not hard to bypass.

What Tony did was up the level of Cloudflare protection.