I was dismayed to recently discover that Forumosa admin has taken at least one of MY posts and reassigned authorship to the poster "Adflob Sales" (originally known as Stewart Pendous), also known as Toe Save.
I was a little confused when I saw the post, because I thought it looked kind of familiar to me. Then I saw that the post was written THREE AND A HALF YEARS before the Stewart Pendous/AdFlob account was even created: :ponder:
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https://taiwanease.com/en/forums/has-fo ... 12985.htmlWell, I took a ride on the Wayback Machine and searched the post in question. Now I realized why I was confused: the reason it looked so familiar to me was because EYE had written the original post. Adflob Sales' counterfeit post was exactly the same in content, down to the same year, month, and day as my original post; even the same time, 2:22 pm:
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This isn't the first time that someone has taken liberties with my account. Last year someone erased the record of all my recommended posts, and of the posts that I had recommended to others. When I asked for an explanation, I got a glib reply blaming the North Koreans, homework-eating dogs, etc. The recommended posts were restored to my account, but I never did find out why I was the only one affected by that "glitch".
It's worth pointing out that the issue I raise today is more serious. This is not content that's mysteriously gone missing. This is content, written by me and now attributed to Forumosa's Director of Business Development.
This raises some significant questions:
1. Who facilitated the appropriation of my posts? This is not something that a mere moderator can do, and anyway, it is my impression that Stewart Pendous/Adflob Sales is not and has never been a moderator.
2. How many of my other posts have been stolen from me?
3. How many posts have been stolen from other people?
4. Have any posts written by others been attributed to me? Have any posts written by Toe Save been attributed to me?

That would be truly distressing!
I'm posting my concerns here on Taiwanease because I think the situation is serious enough that it warrants informing other people, and also because in light of the response to last year's shenanigans, I'm not optimistic that I'll be taken seriously this time around either. I'm reluctant to post content when it can so easily be stolen by the very people running the site and attributed to someone on their own team. But just in case anyone from forumosa.com sees this, what I'd like, is for the above four questions to be answered, apologies given, by both the person who facilitated the theft of my post as well as the person who assumed ownership of my post, and for the post in question (and any others like it) to be restored to their original authorship. I'm not holding my breath, however.
This is all very disheartening. On the Internet, whether at Taiwanease, TaiwanHo, Forumosa, or Facebook, we are the sum of our words. Don't steal my words from me, please.