I was a beta user there and got the first turnip pet(?) if I remember correctly. Well I wasn't really that active there but I really liked its cute forum design and character art. I still remember I my first avatar I dressed up. And because I loved it so much I decided to make a whole profile theme/layout to go with it. Then about a week later I was told by a user from another site I played that someone had the same avatar as me. At first I wasn't that bothered since I wasn't an active user there. Sure I felt uncomfortable and kind of frustrated that the copied my avatar 1:1 but the items were easily obtainable in game and there were still very few items to play with at that time, and there's nowhere to toggle off "items wearing" viewability on my profile so there's really nothing I could do about it. But then when I clicked into their profile I noticed that they also copied the layout and theme of my profile (and only changed the username and about me section of the whole design, w/o credit at least for inspiration. This made me upset because I made the layout myself so I decided to dm them asking for answers. When I received no reply, I just asked them in their profile comments. Fast forward to 2 days later I got a dm from a moderator warning me about harassment and telling me to delete my comment so I wouldn't get warning points or banned. I just quit then and there.

As a profile/layout designer this this wasn't my first rodeo. People took my work with minimal changes and put up as theirs. But there's a difference. These people actually have the courtesy to dm me about it and/or ask for guidance, and I don't mind as long as they don't use the exact same color palette and images (that I tirelessly rendered/edited/drew) unless I explicitly give them permission to use. I do get a little icky when they just replace the images/elements and with similar somethings w/o other changes but I get over that pretty quickly. While I mostly do image based layouts, I sometimes do coded layouts too. I'm not trained in html or coding, everything is self taught, so it takes time to figure out each site's cans and can'ts, usually by studying others' layout codes, trial and error, then make a layout. It's really disheartening when someone just decides to copy paste code for code, image for image. And when I asked about it, and I wasn't being rude about it, just asking about the layout and mentioning my dm and for them to reply to my dm, I was reported and was warned by a moderator to stop.

Well I dodged a bullet I guess. I was about to drop $ for custom skins and packs, as a few of my friends had just switched over to main DV back then.