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Hello everyone! I'm here hoping for your opinions on how to handle claims of one of your members using plagiarized characters for your site. I've never run into this particular problem before, and I think that's because for the most part, we all consider RP characters to be pretty personal. We put our time and effort into them, and as such we respect that others have done the same for THEIR characters. I know that for me, personally, the idea of stealing someone else's character never occurred to me to do, and I'm sure it's the same for a lot of people. Anyway! Last night, a guest popped up into our CBox and made a claim that one of our members had stolen her character from another site. The guest did not back up or substantiate their claim, and when we inquired about it, the member in question was adamant that the character had always been HERS, and that SHE was the victim, not the other way around. Personally, I know that plagiarism is a serious accusation. But I have also been accused of art theft on images that I myself drew from scratch (and spent hours on, no less!) and posted. People would see the image posted in two or more locations, and assumed that one of those was a thief. Taking that into consideration, I took to Google and searched for traces of this character on other sites. I tried copy/pasting the app text into the search, including the most commonly used strings of text. I visited the link the Guest had provided in the CBox to check for a copyright date, a "posted on" date, or similar, but found nothing except that it was last updated in June of this year. The earliest iteration of this character I could find was December 2015, using the same RL name as the person on my site, even though the OOC tag she's using differs from that. Someone suggested checking IP addresses, but as I personally know, that can change for a number of reasons, including switching from mobile access to PC, from PC to laptop, from home network to work or school, and so on. It can occur with a change in internet service provider, or sometimes even by moving houses, AND if you have a dynamic IP address, it can change from day to day. So checking IP isn't the best way to go about that, unfortunately. So, given all that I've listed above, how would you admin handle a situation like this one on your forum? I'd like to avoid placing blame or pointing fingers. At this point I have asked the member for evidence that this character is hers, such as logging into existing apps and making a note which contains our site name so that we know they are indeed hers. I've also made it clear that while we value her as a member, we cannot condone plagiarism and she may need to re-write the app from scratch as opposed to copy/pasting it directly from another site. Thanks in advance for your input!