To be honest, I now- in retrospect- know it was probably the wrong approach to immediately bring a comment- that was only negative because of an easily missable typo inflicted by autosuggest software (something I should have taken the time to figure out before jumping to the wrong conclusion)- to the attention of board members on a Discord channel that not everyone here participates in.

Linstar is correct that the appropriate thing to have done would have been to email him at the address that Wordpress attached to the message. This is something I didn’t consider at the time; mainly because I’ve been fending off an angry badfic author/fan of said author/someone I unknowingly upset for other reasons/etc. for some months now.

I still do not know the identity of my lovely attacker beyond a few burner emails that they used to post some highly obscene comments on my blog, some sockpuppet accounts they created on FF.net and Wordpress, and a IP address associated with the obscene abuse comments that appears to be associated with a VPN proxy service from what my limited investigations have turned up.

Linstar’s unfortunate typo was, through no fault of Linstar’s, a possible lead for me that I’d finally caught my troublemaker red handed.

That assumption, again in retrospect, was incredibly meritless and without any real proof.

To be clear, I didn’t fully suspect that Linstar was connected- whoever’s been harassing me now for some time has been pretty good at hiding their exact motives and any identifying data I could use to report their main account to the relevant sites. Linstar’s SPaG was also significantly better than my abuser possesses, and was significantly less verbose and lacked the usual array of obscenities.

All I know about this person is that:

a) they know I posted guest riffs on the Library

b) this makes them upset somehow, and they think I’m an awful writer

c) they care enough about whatever riff I wrote that they falsely reported me for having gratuitous child s3x in three stories I posted last year- none of which featured any characters under the age of eighteen- this having them taken down without appeal.

And

d) They have a mastery of the english language that would make Squirrelking into Shakespeare, and a hardened sailor blush.

I only know that they were the one who did this and this is why my stories were deleted because they sent me a PM gloating about it, which I wish I’d kept for evidence, and not deleted out of anger and frustration.

Long story short, while I did have enough doubt to not immediately go on the warpath, I also didn’t have the forethought to email Linstar and take it up provately. It was a pretty thoughtless decision to take it up on the Discord, and it was also pretty blanche to then bring all of the drama onto the board proper.

Linstar, mate, I’m very sorry for unintentionally causing this whole thing to turn into such a massive drama, I apologise for not having the common sense to be less public about what was clearly not an intentional attack, and I’m very sorry to all the people who’ve had their feathers ruffled by the drama I indirectly spurred into motion.

I know this isn’t the best return I could have made to the community- part of the reason I’ve been gone for most of the last few years is because I did cause a fair amount of nuisance last time I was here, and I didn’t feel my presence was adding to the community at that time (I also had commitments to other communities, most of which have now wrapped up)- and I’ve probably already broken the promise I made myself that I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself here again. However, I’m willing to accept responsibility for my part in this incident, and try to move forwards in a less disruptive fashion.

(Tl;dr this has been a valuable lesson that thinking before acting is golden, to not assume the worst right off the bat, and to try to keep things above-board- so to speak)