How to really treat an Art Thief

Art thieves are the many patches of dirt on dA's dramallama.

What bothers me is how people treat art thieves. Yes, they are "bad", but they way people treat them just makes the situation that much worse. I can remember the journals people would post telling users to go spam on that user page about their theft. I find the whole ordeal to be obnoxious, you can't feed a troll with more trolling you have to outwit them.

There are different types of art thieves too. Not all of them purposely upload devs, knowing its not their work. Many are not educated about what dA is and treat it like a photobucket. Some do it on purpose, to gain popularity. I've seen this to the extremes, where someone joins and a few days later they get 50k views because of one piece of stolen art.

I'm sure this would anger people, you want to flame them, tell them they are worthless and pathetic for taking credit for something that isn't theirs. This only feeds their fire. Trolls are hardy people; their power comes from doing something people don't like and know that people have no control to stop it.

A common misconception - I'm certain a majority of people on dA have no idea or knowledge on how to report a deviation or a user.

Trolls don't have power if they can't talk - getting the account and devs reported is the best assault to their agenda.
- Comment only stating you've reported them and their devs, but don't comment back no matter how tempting it is. If they escalate it, its to your advantage; more evidence.
- If you post journals regarding a thief who's stolen your work, either warn people not to feed the troll or don't post a link to their user page.
- Get people to help find the original devs so you can report them faster. I find the hardest thing about reporting is finding the original, sometimes its not even on dA.
- Thieves that have a user page littered with badmouthing is certainly a candidate for reporting it to the help desk, but remember you need lots of dA links to prove your point. Comment and journal links work best.

It's taken a while to perfect the matter, 2 years of deal with trolls on dAmn has helped me through some of this, but most of it is common sense. I am guilty of trolling thieves when I first met some, but after a while you notice that flaming doesn't fix the problem. As soon as they start trolling back, report them.