>_< I suggest you look past your inconvenience before you spout nonsense. Authors wanting to protect their work are not stupid. Yes, we cannot completely stop plagiarism but we can at least make it harder for them. Just because a thief can still enter through a window, doesn't mean we should leave our doors open (got that in wikihow). 

Are you naive? Have you not read all those blogs from authors whose works got stolen? Have you not met an author who put down her stories because one was translated without permission or plagiarized? You don't know how hard it is to take back what is taken from you.

I bet one of the reasons why users of ff.net have that Hall of Shame and Infamy forum is because plagiarism has become rampant over the years and the site is too large to be monitored daily by their mods. So they took it upon themselves to police the site. Sadly, I still have seen published authors whose works were plagiarized and turned to fanfics and even though they reported it, no action was taken.The number one reason why published authors look down on fanfic writers. 

These third party downloaders allow you to convert fanfics to different formats like pdf, epub, mobi, html, etc. Yes, it is convenient for the readers to have their daily dose of fanfics even without the internet. But at what cost? Can't you just compromise? Read when you can. Buy ebooks. I mean, you love reading from your e-readers anyway. 

Don't you know that we can copy text in pdf files? I also posted before that there is a forum which steals fics and sells them to others so their clients could publish it as their own.

That's why authors don't want readers copying or downloading their stories. Even if the stories are flawed, the authors spent time creating them. It is their words. They are not stupid. Maybe, you don't know how it feels to have something you created stolen from you. I hope it doesn't happen to you. 

And to the rest of us, if author forbids us to translate or download his/her stories, let's respect that. If author wants his/her stories to remain here, let's respect that. 

I honestly feel the most safe and secure here in AFF. The mods respond to reports promptly. And the report content button is very accessible, now only if users make use of it. We can also disallow text selection (a feature that was just recently introduced in ff.net). Third party downloaders are blocked at the moment. Admin of that site asks for a middle ground to allow his site to grab content from AFF. Hmm. I trust boss nichi :) 
 

-Keeper

/coz I couldn't bring myself to talk with that person