I recently received a PM from JackalRelated:
Hello! I sent Modern_Erasmus a PM regarding this, and I was informed that since "this isn’t a rewrite, rather a clarification on plagiarism boundaries, the people to ask would be the staff disciplinary team."
I come to you with a question pertaining a "rewrite" of a concept that was pitched in the forums but never acted on.
In this forum post: http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-4716449 , Rainbowknishes stated their idea for an SCP and an additional plot in a further comment on that post. They appear to have a relevant draft here: http://scp-int-sandbox.wikidot.com/scp-dominoes , but it appears to be completely different in scope: the only thing similar seems to be the "monolithic dominoes". They have not updated the draft in 706 days, and have not been active for another 695. They are not active on-site either, since according to scpper they only have one upvote on December 26, 2017.I have an idea based off of the concept and plot of the forum post, but with a different spin of things. The only things I would keep in my idea draft are:
The idea of a structure 'towering' over a city. (In my draft, it is a normal-radio tower not unlike London's BT tower. Arguably it is nearly impossible to claim this idea as one's own, but there will be a similar structure so I will include this point for brevity.)
The idea of the tower being assimilated into daily life through media.
"Crazy" people rebelling against the tower.
An agent sent to the city, who eventually decides to go against protocol and bomb the tower.
I know it is plagiarism to use their sandbox draft without permission and I do not intend to do so whatsoever. I have sent them a PM explaining the situation, but it has since been two weeks and I am now fairly sure they are inactive will not respond; thus me asking you to prevent being accused of plagiarism when I do not intend to pass off the work as my own. I am entirely willing to credit the user for the idea in an author post, or even if required I would be willing to give co-authorship credit to the user. I would be hesitant to rework the draft completely, but if that is the only course of action should the author not respond I will be vigilant in doing so.I am asking the rewrite team (or I can ask official staff if need be) if I am allowed to continue ahead with writing my draft and idea, and if so, what steps I should take in crediting the user for their idea. Thank you.
(Just to reiterate, I WILL NOT be using their sandbox draft at all as that is indeed plagiarism. I only want to use aspects of their SCP idea that they appear to not be using.)
Thank you.
How do we want to proceed?