My gift to the fandom

How to spot a fake:

Bonibaru posted this to VeelasInc this morning:

> A friend of mine recently posted that she'd been emailed a copy
> of "the 5th HP book" in e-book form (PDF file). She wanted me to
> tell her if it seemed legitimate, or was a fake.
>
> It's pretty clear ... that it's a big
> hairy fake.


And I replied with this Investigative Report:

It's from a Czech fanfic site, so I won't mock the grammar - it was
likely written by someone who is not a native English speaker.

You can find it here: http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:c4FFHelgjSQC:www.harrypotter.cz/en/chapter1.htm+%22%22HARRY!%22,+yelled+the+voice.+Now+Harry+knew+who+was+making+it,+his+Aunt+Petunia.%22&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

And here's how to have a VERY easy time determining whether the PDF
some t00b sends to you is definitely a fake:

Google it.

Take a sentence or two from the begining or the middle, and paste it
into Google.com - if it's a fanfic, it *will* show up somewhere. If
it doesn't show up, that doesn't mean it's definitely real, but the
fact of its showing up will make it dead clear that it's just someone's
fanfic.

Now, there have been a few cases of fanfics being taken by people other than the original author and uploaded to Kazaa or emailed around, usually in PDF format with page numbers and stuff, and being passed off as OoTP. I know it's happened to psychic_serpent's fic. So please, don't blame the author if you see a fanfic being passed off as OoTP. It's likely as not that it's not the fault of the author at all.

Feel free to pass the above around, btw.

Now, you may return to your various battlestations.