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The developer in me hates what #CloudFlare's anti-bot checks are turning the web into. As a blind person, I'm occasionally frustrated at having to obtain an accessibility cookie to bypass the CAPTCHA. My inclusive design/accessibility professional side hates that those cookies have to be obtained in a way that doesn't fully respect privacy.
But simply as a human, what I find most objectional of all is CloudFlare's "Checking if the site connection is secure" messaging. That sounds like a good thing; how nice that this site is looking out for my protection as a humble web user! When in fact, my activity and circumstances are being checked against an arbitrary set of requirements and baseline-level metrics, to determine if I have the right to go where I want to go. It has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with information lockdown.
Of course, CloudFlare's lawyers probably signed off on this copy as being just close enough to the truth. They are checking that the site connection is secure... against bad actors. Which they may very well find to be you if they can't prove your human nature beyond reasonable doubt, so watch out.
@jscholes It thoroughly breaks my enjoyment of fanfiction in the way that I like, as a result. I can mitigate it in an annoying way, but I shouldn't feel like I have to.
@FreakyFwoof Exactly! Almost as bad as when I paste a particular author's fanfic URLs into FicHub, and it tells me that they personally asked for the ability to download their work to be removed from the tool. Their free, text-based work, itself stemming from somebody else's copyrighted material. Get out of here with that shit.
@jscholes @FreakyFwoof That's super weird, you'd think authors would want their work to spread as much as possible. It's not like they're charging by the copy or even benefiting from advertising.
@modulux @jscholes @FreakyFwoof Part of that is because others might upload it pretending it's theirs, and get the kudos and comments and engagement that the person who wrote it should be getting. Plagiarism is a problem.
But having it available for personal use shouldn't be made so difficult!
@shadyspotlight @jscholes @FreakyFwoof Ok, that makes sense. I just don't know how much forbidding downloads helps with that, since people can copy and paste from the websites. I guess it does make it a little more convenient.
@shadyspotlight I have no time for plagiarism. As you say, unauthorised reposting can starve the original creator of community engagement, result in edits not being propagated, etc.
When it comes to downloaders, though, FicHub is not the only game in town; some websites like AO3 even have a native download feature that authors cannot disable. Failing the ability to download a work, people bent on copying it will just take it from their browser.
And so much like the CloudFlare features that prompted this thread, trying to prevent fanfiction downloads is mostly security theatre that harms readership more than it helps writers. Heck, somebody particularly vindictive, upon realising that their download rights are being negated, may treat that as fuel for the fire, making reposting more likely. I don't endorse such behaviour, but I'd certainly consider it if I was an author. As the comma-heavy sentences before this one make clear, I am not one :)