PSA: Crazy Person to Watch Out For
Wow.
So there is this woman in fandom for the sole purpose of making money by gathering information on us, tricking us into adding more details, selling our data to “media corporations,” and using this “business plan” as an excuse to get a tax write-off on her cell phone and computer.
In order to generate traffic for her website, this woman is purposely creating wank by publicly outing other fans who prefer to keep their RL identities private.
I’m not linking to her site because I don’t want to provide traffic for her. Her name is Laura Hale/Michaela Ecks/partly_bouncy/purplepopple and her site is FanHistory / the FanHistory Wiki. I’d advise not going there, since her whole goal here is to get traffic and attention.
I’m just posting this to help spread the word and make sure people know to watch out for her, because she’s gotten away with this for a long time by preying on fandom’s trust and expectation of basic decent behavior from other fans.
Current Mood: 
sick
4 Responses to “PSA: Crazy Person to Watch Out For”
Nmissi on July 23, 2008 1:38 pm | Link
Whoa. I had never even heard about any of this, and I read fanthropology. I wondered what that post was about!
I am ashamed to admit I went to her wiki and googled myself. Looks like she runs a bot that does cursory checks of fanfic sites, but not much more than that. All the insider dirt and old wankage I personally know about didn’t come up with the search engine. Which was quite the relief, to be honest.
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rusty-halo on July 23, 2008 1:59 pm | Link
I’ve been kind of vaguely following it because I read metafandom, and she is constantly spamming it with links to her rabidly anti-OTW posts. I think she’s sort of an anti-OTW ringleader, basically because she sees the fact that they’re building a non-profit, non-biased, collaborative, useful wiki as a threat to her profit-driven, biased, useless one.
She does apparently run a bot that creates pages for everyone who’s ever had a profile on FF.net, which is, of course, less than useless if you’re seeking actual information about fandom. Her wiki is full of inaccurate information, and she’s actually known for banning people who try to correct it. She also tries to invent her own fannish terms for things that already exist (like bandom and FPF) and uses her wiki to make it seem as if her fake terms are in actual fannish use.
Basically, she’s always been grudgey and profit-driven and kind of nuts. But she’s gone absolutely beyond the pale by deliberately revealing fans’ real life names and refusing to take the information down, all in an attempt to drive traffic and attention to her own site.
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nutmeg3 on July 23, 2008 9:27 pm | Link
I’ve never heard of her, but sadly, I’m not surprised that someone would find a way to turn fandom to her own profit. There are all kinds of creeps out there, unfortunately.
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rusty-halo on July 23, 2008 11:02 pm | Link
I know there’s a number of skeevy people who are just out for a profit. I’m still surprised at someone so blatantly and maliciously going after another fan’s real life, not just out of a grudge but for money. “It doesn’t matter if I wreck your professional life as long as it gets me a few clicks on my Google ads.” *shudders*
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