I'm a writer and have written some pieces of furry literature, and was wondering if there was somewhere I could post that, on this site or otherwise. Thank you!

SoFurry is the usual place, or Inkbunny if cubs are involved. FurAffinity also hosts text submissions. e621 does not and there are no plans for it to do so.

wat8548 said:
SoFurry is the usual place, or Inkbunny if cubs are involved. FurAffinity also hosts text submissions. e621 does not and there are no plans for it to do so.

Oh, thanks.

kora_viridian said:
I agree with the sites wat8548 listed.

Tip: When you actually go to post a story, the "safest" way is to cut and paste the text from whatever you wrote it in (Word, Notepad++, Google Docs, etc) into the site's own edit box, and then go in to the site's edit box and manually add bold, italics, chapter headings, etc as needed.

If you're only targeting one site, and you want a lot of formatting in your story, second choice is to learn what formatting codes your site accepts (SoFurry will take some HTML, FurAffinity uses a flavor of BBCode, etc), put those codes in your story as you write it in Word (or whatever), and then cut and paste the whole thing into the site's own edit box.

Don't upload a Word .docx or .doc straight to any site. FurAffinity, at least, accepts those files, but does not strip the metadata from them, which almost always includes your Windows user name. This means that anybody who downloads the story can find out your Windows user name. If your Windows account is also named Hazey-Dazey, that's not such a disaster, but a lot of people use some or all of their real name as their Windows user name.

A PDF may or may not have metadata that identifies you. Adobe's own products tend to include a lot of metadata when creating PDF files; other products include less. If you do make a PDF, look at it in a couple of different PDF readers on your machine before uploading it - look for the "Properties", "User Info", "About This PDF", or similar menu options in the PDF reader, and see if any of that lists information you'd rather not share.

(Artists don't have to worry about this so much, because there is software that knows how to remove metadata from most image types, and most furry art sites use it before they make images available for download. There is software to do this for some document types, but furry art sites don't seem to be as good at using it on documents.)

Those are also usually just ZIP files with XML in them or the like, so in theory you can clean it yourself. But yeah, copy and paste that stuff (or save as a format without metadata like plain text). I would not trust Microsoft to actually remove all metadata using methods you see when Googling "remove word metadata". It probably still leaves the Office license number in it. Remember: This is software developed for other corporations, not private individuals, and they want to be able to easily trace who messed with something.

https://www.vcsolutions.com/blog/is-your-word-document-leaking-secrets/ Hilariously, in the old days (decades ago), they used direct binaries of memory dumps so it sometimes even included entirely different documents or passwords or whatever in the 'slack'. As you can imagine, this made compatibility between versions a crapshoot.

Does Libreoffice have similar issues?

peacethroughpower said:
Does Libreoffice have similar issues?

LMGTFY j/k
https://superuser.com/questions/1195338/what-metadata-does-a-libreoffice-file-contain-and-how-to-remove-it At least it's all in one file within the archive. You can just open that file as an archive in 7Z and not even need to rename it (right-click option).

PDFs and similar documents were lulzy because you could intentionally hide uncensored versions of images in them. I think a lot of artists moved away from PDFs so this is not as common, anymore. ANY layered image formats like the source files before exporting to PNG/JPEG/WEBP have this 'unintended' feature for artists to abuse to bypass censors.

On big gotcha, is no one's mentioning filesystem-level metadata. Like, the date and time, the filename itself, and the alternate data streams which can also include information like author name. I believe 7Z and others all have options not to save at least that last part. I saw some let you strip the date and time by replacing it with Epoch (1970) or the like.

AO3 (archive of our own) is pretty much the site for literature in general, although it's not furry specific. It was originally made for fanfiction but these days there's plenty of original works too.
It has a similar anti-censorship philosophy to e621 where all fictional content is allowed, although unfortunately the tagging system isn't quite as robust as e6. It's still pretty good though and works fine for literature, imo literature and images just have different tagging needs.

kora_viridian said:
I've tested this on FA before, and at least for images, the timestamp I get for the image file is within a couple of seconds of the human-readable timestamp displayed on the FA submission page. I'd guess this is because FA either resizes or strips the metadata on most (all?) images, so the file it makes available for download is always generated shortly before the submission page goes live. I haven't checked it for stories on FA, or on other sites.

This varies more. FA seems to prepend their own numbering on to whatever filename the artist used. e621 uses the md5sum of the image. Weasyl creates a file name out of the Weasyl account name and the title the artist gave (minus stuff like quotes).

I know old MacOS could have two "forks" for each file; I'm not sure how or if that carried forward into OS X. I'm pretty sure NTFS also supports this concept, but I remember scanning an image of an entire PC once, and there were only a handful of files that even claimed to have them.

I feel like most tools people use to upload art or stories are just going to grab the main data stream. I think a site would have to accept archive formats (zip, rar, 7z, etc) to have a chance of even getting the alternate data stream from the uploader in the first place.

I wasn't trying to tell people how to be safe from state-level attackers - these days, those agencies probably have a copy of everything on the Internet anyway. :D I just wanted to advise about some easy mistakes I've seen artists and writers make before, when uploading.

Well, I was thinking in lines of stalkers. Saying "State level" is kind of misleading, especially as tools get leaked and many of them are repackaged public stuff. Ugh, the snake oil sold to law enforcement. Real state-level stuff I'd assume includes bypassing stuf like Apple's protections, (in)Secure Boot, abusing the radio code of a cell phone, and so on, I guess. Stuff you couldn't trivially download or figure out yourself. Oh, BTW on MSI motherboards.... :P When you get the 'fans' organized enough, there's likely at least one that'll try doxing techniques and others that'll risk prison abusing said info. :(

There was a joke that you could have all the encryption you want, but we'll just keep hashes of everything as you decrypt it and if flagged, download a copy. End-to-end is useless if you have an useful idiot running the company that makes your device's OS. China came up with their own variants of device monitoring tools normally used to keep say, porn or games (or nonapproved apps in general) off devices you loaned out. Yeah, censorware has a huge overlap with that. In US, it's parents and employers installing this junk.

AFAIK, the only likely way to get those forked parts of a file off of a computer involves either direct copy from device to device, or having an archive embed it. BTW: Every single file you download with a web browser has a ADS attached. It's how the OS knows that it was downloaded, and not just copied or saved locally. Stuff like multiple versions is another thing that doesn't really leave the original machine, normally.

kora_viridian said:
Within the past year or so, Apple announced that iOS was going to start looking for certain kinds of illegal content; I assume that's one of the techniques it uses.

There is no assuming. That's exactly what it would have done. The remote downloading feature and all.

I found a reference to IE doing that, and got curious. The newest Windows machine I have handy is 8.1. There were a couple of files I downloaded months ago, both EXEs, that I'm pretty sure I downloaded with Firefox, and neither of them have an ADS. I downloaded another file just now (a ZIP) using Firefox and it has an ADS with the "zone" info. Interesting.

Yeah, it seems to vary between programs and file types. There is no need for such a flag with image files, for example.

I think an earlier version of this, maybe from Win 9x/ME, was that Microsoft declared an "internet" bit, next to the good old RASH bits, in the FAT directory entry. Files you downloaded would have that bit set, which would trigger the "This file was downloaded from the Internet..." dialog when you tried to open or run it. 9x/ME couldn't depend on having NTFS, so maybe that's the "best" they could do with what they had.

I don't even remember that. Hmm, interesting! Readonly Archive Secret/System Hidden and then reserved ones for downloaded or such? I guess this makes sense.

In penguin land, ext2/3/4 supports "extended attributes", but I think they're limited to 4,096 bytes total... you can't have an arbitrary-size fork/ADS like you can with NTFS.
edit: grammar

You can however do a lot of other cool things like links. ;)

hazey-dazey said:
I'm a writer and have written some pieces of furry literature, and was wondering if there was somewhere I could post that, on this site or otherwise. Thank you!

This did mostly turn into a linus tech tip flash mob, but back to your original question, you could post on Archive of Our Own (often shortened to AO3).