"How does Scrbid survive when The Trove Got Nuked?" Topic

Makes no sense to me. I know what gamers think their hobby is the be-all-and-end-all, but, sorry to break it to you guys, there are publishing companies out there that could chew up both WOTC and GW and spit them out a hundred times over.

And yet, Scribd goes merrily on publishing whatever they want to their site, while The Trove got kicked in the teeth after… what? Was it even a year?

I ask in total ignorance and dumbfoundedness. I just don't get it.

Makes no sense to me. I know what gamers think their hobby is the be-all-and-end-all, but, sorry to break it to you guys, there are publishing companies out there that could chew up both WOTC and GW and spit them out a hundred times over.

And yet, Scribd goes merrily on publishing whatever they want to their site, while The Trove got kicked in the teeth after… what? Was it even a year?

I ask in total ignorance and dumbfoundedness. I just don't get it.

And why am I yet unable to start a topic without the first post getting repeated?

Are you maybe refreshing the page? That used to be a guaranteed way of getting a double post.

So I have to pull back out of TMP before I can look at it? Weird.

I've actually seen an Ad for Scribd in mainstream media. I had to do a double-take as I always thought it was a piracy site.

I don't know what else you'd call it.

Personally, I love(d) them both, because my games are pretty eclectic to modern tastes, and quite frankly, I've sold all of $300 USD worth on drivethrurpg. But for me its always been about getting the word out, so who cares?

That said, I'm still bewildered by Scribd's continued existence.

I didn't know The Trove was down, but I guess I'm not surprised.

Scribd is surprising. I guess they got some lawyers to create a veneer of some kind. They are actually charging money, which on the one hand makes it worse but on the other hand pays for lawyers.

The Trove looked like someone put some real work into it. Or so I hear, I'm sure I wouldn't know. But if they did a lot of work they might not give up easily, I wonder if it will be back in some form.

Is there an account anywhere of what happened to The Trove? Who set it up, how they got away with it as long as they did, how it was taken down? I'm curious.

What is (or was, apparently) The Trove?

Someone set up a web page in Iceland that had many, many gigabytes of gaming PDFs. Truckloads, mostly RPG stuff, I think, but a little of everything. Some of it was PDFs that were available for sale elsewhere, some of it was PDFs of things only available commercially as actual books. I think they had mostly big properties. I think it was free, no account set up necessary, and I think I read that there were ads so it was somewhat monetized.

I had been a user of Trove, obviously. I used it to put up my own games, but I did grab a few things (crucify me if you want) but all of it, I think, that was up for free elsewhere (small publisher stuff like mine, or old Judge's Guild and similar).

My point is that whatever you think about piracy, Trove was relatively harmless.

Scribd, otoh? Hoist the jolly roger and sail in guns blazing! You can literally get any major publication there if you wait a few days for it to get reposted. Yes. they will take stuff down, but they are deliberately(?) slow to do so.

It is common knowledge that the whole purpose of it is to get what you don't want to pay for.