Hello everyone,
With the close of Dashingdon a lot of enthusiastic readers were worried about losing access to some of their favorite demos. Some of these readers undertook efforts to preserve demos by copying them to other sites. Personally I didn’t like the idea of doing anything with people’s work without permission. I don’t want to speak for every writer and I also understand reader enthusiasm and passion is the cornerstone of this community, but I thought it best this is brought to every writer’s attention if they aren’t already aware. And I hope readers can understand my point of view and that of writers that think similarly.
Having ported over my demo to other sites I didn’t think anyone would want or need to copy my demo elsewhere. But I discovered my demo was copied and is now being hosted on another site. (FYI this site has no affiliation with choice of games) It seems the operator of that site copied every game posted to dashingdon.
And I’ve seen a lot of praise for this on here and on reddit. The problem is I was never asked permission to copy my demo and host it somewhere else. Was anybody asked? Another issue on top of this that really made me upset to discover is that inside of these demos copied without permission is a link to donate. Inside of my copied demo and inside of all of yours is a link to donate money. Will we see any of this money? Of course not. It goes to the guy that copied our work without permission.
For the hardworking writers on here, I just thought you should know about this if you weren’t aware. What can be done? I don’t know. For readers we deeply appreciate your passion but I hope you can see this situation from my perspective and understand why I’m upset about it. It just feels unethical.
Thanks