Art spam on fanfiction.net

[ffutures]

Over the last month or so I've received at least eight or ten messages and reviews on fanfiction.net from people who say that they are huge fans of my work and want to illustrate it - which is stupid for several reasons, not least that fanfiction.net only allows one small title graphic per story, which has to also be used shrunk as an icon for the story.

I'm guessing that following up on this results in the artist wanting payment via Patreon or similar, and either no result or a piece of AI-generated extruded fanfic art product which breaks the uncanny valley in multiple ways. I'm not interested anyway, because I make my own illos if I need them.

Am I unlucky in this, or is everyone who posts there receiving this sort of spam?

 

Comments

[nomadicwriter]

Yep, it's been going on for months, unfortunately. Looking in my FF.net inbox I've got twenty similar messages going back to July. FF.net seemed to succeed in blocking them for a while, but I think they got a bit smarter at looking like legitimate PM traffic by doing things like favouriting stories before sending messages and so on. Unfortunately, FF.net doesn't seem to have any simple one-click way of reporting spammers, so you have to manually email support about it every time and I must admit I haven't been bothering. (I feel like, as you say, the spammers have completely misunderstood what kind of site they're targeting and can't possibly be getting enough results to justify the effort, but then I feel that way about most types of spam and scams, so I guess there must be some percentage of people falling for all these things somewhere.)

[ffutures]

That's pretty much what I've done - I've been trying for more than two years to get FF.net technical support to remove a review with offensive language from one of my stories, so I can't see much point in trying to get action on these bozos.

[dragoness_e]

Yes, it's widespread. /r/AO3 and /r/fanfiction have had discussions of the scam, and I may have seen it on Tumblr as well.

[ffutures]

Thanks - it makes a lot more sense than my work suddenly becoming popular, since I have posted very little this year.

[greyliliy]

I'm getting the spam messages, too. It's very annoying.