Alright! So… just recently we’ve added a new tag called Bully Crime. Why? Because these bullies are getting to the point where their behavior is becoming so aggressive, they are stepping WAY over the line. Just recently, Athena received an email from our new hosting company that someone, from a blocked IP address no less, tried to hack into our account by trying to reset our password. Fortunately, Bluehost provided the IP address that attempted it. Athena then looked it up and found that it is from Comcast. As Comcast has a policy against criminal behavior, Athena contacted their Customer Security Assurance at abuse@comcast.com and reported what happened:
Comcast immediately responded to let us know that they’re investigating the IP. We’ll update everyone as soon as we hear back.
So, bullies, just to let you know, hacking into someone’s account is criminal behavior. You get that? CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR. If you pull this kind of bullshit again, we WILL report you and if we find out who you are, we WILL press charges against you. So think about that before you do something stupid… again.
And they wonder why no one trusts a word they say.
You guys might not be aware of it, but some people can’t see this site from certain search engines. It comes up blank as “Internal Server Error.” And I don’t think they did anything to get blocked on purpose.
They may not have. The firewall is set up to look for certain activity and when it sees it, it blocks the IP. Do you know which engines it’s blocking? If you do, we can get Stitch to fix it.
Internet Explorer is one. I don’t know about others.
Good work. Cooperate with the authorities and remove the post from the internet if they instruct you to do so.
A friendly suggestion, I would consider setting up alternate sites on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
With STGRB appearing on multiple fronts, it’ll be a lot harder for the Somerloons to try to shut down all of those sites, especially Tumblr.
Keep up the excellent work.
Excellent idea! We just need to find the time to do it.
I would follow you on any of those sites.
I hope we get to learn who this IP belongs to. Then it would be interesting to see how they defend themselves. I don’t think we have seen the worst of what they are capable of doing. But seriously, is there anyone here who is too surprised about this? I think I mentioned somewhere on another post that I felt we would soon see one or more of these bullies in jail this year.
Please stay on top of this you guys. Have you talked to law enforcement about your options yet? Have you talked to Bluehost? Have you talked to Comcast?
I hope this person is discovered and loses (at the very least) their service provider. And that you guys learn who it is. Criminal behavior such as this can be a game changer. Especially if it is discovered that this person is a member of BBA group on GR. Imagine the hit to their reputation. Not that their rep is all that good right now anyway.
Tweeted!
*sigh* here’s another victim I found: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/3574046-stay-strong-fellow-writers-stay-strong
Have a nice day.
Good job. We’ll look into it.
Aaaaand over on Amazon…
some author is getting reamed for having thought El Paso was humid.
http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle/ref=cm_cd_et_up_redir?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdPage=24&cdThread=Tx9PM27AZVN0W1&newContentID=Mx14ZF086UXVK4A&newContentNum=594#Mx8VAY8OEHGD0L
Goronwy,
Can anyone find out for us who the author is who attacked Sharon’s books? If she’s not willing to write about this person, then we are!
Good work, you guys! I hope you find out who it is and bust them!
So I have been following some of the reviews for Christopher Pike’s new release, Witch World, and it seems there is a huge Christopher Pike fan going around and commenting on all of the reviews that are not favorable.
You guys have talked mostly about reviewers bullying authors, but it’s interesting to see reviewers going after each other.
A few examples:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/413354552
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/471598236
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/413909580
The author was also accused of creating sock puppet accounts before to defend one of his earlier works:
http://www.amazon.com/review/RJ1258PRUMDRD/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0547342470&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=
From all of us at STGRB, thank you everyone for the great links! We have some new posts planned very soon. There are so many we want to publish, there’s almost no time to do it all. But we’ll try!