Someone Scraped Our Database, Posted It on Reddit, and Got Treated Like a Hero.

The tumultuous, emotional rollercoaster story of Mike Lumos and his scraping adventures.

Jul 11, 2026

Hi friends.

It’s been an incredibly emotional couple of days. This situation is still raw, but I want to get right to what happened.

Thursday Night: The Discovery

My head curator, Mel, notified me about a post exploding on r/Screenwriting. This was the headline:

I built a huge library of screenplays for over 11,700 movies and TV shows. I hope you’ll find it interesting and useful! Posted by MikeLumos
“Hey everyone! For years I’ve been building a collection of screenplays, and I just finished a complete rebuild of my website...”

You probably know where this is going, but stay with me. The narrative that followed was an absolute gut-punch.

Mel is a rockstar. She personally uploads and indexes a significant percentage of the scripts you find in the Script Hive database. She has been doing this for years.

When she looked at the list this user was claiming as his own, she recognized it instantly. She identified that the core of this “11,700” list was sourced directly from Script Hive.

It was undeniable. His list used her unique naming conventions, even when there were typos. He had specific scripts that only we possess, and that only we had indexed.

Mike had scraped our database.

Confirmed: The Scraping Bot

I quickly notified our developer team. I needed to be sure.

Could they verify the activity? Yes.

It turns out Mike Lumos wasn’t some anonymous hacker. He has an account on Script Hive, and a username in our Discord. The developer team verified that his most recent login to the database was July 8th, the day before he dropped “god’s gift to screenwriters” on Reddit.

I want to shout out admiral and unsquare, who not only built the Script Hive site, but work tirelessly to defend it from scrapers. THIS DELAYS THEM FROM MAKING OTHER IMPROVEMENTS TO THE SITE… THANKS HACKERS.

Before we learned how to stop people like Mike, his bot managed to scrape 9,000 scripts in a matter of days. Nine thousand scripts that took our teams of tireless volunteers TEN YEARS to collect.

The Hero’s Welcome

Meanwhile, Mike’s Reddit post was in overdrive. Thousands of upvotes. Hundreds of comments. Redditors were “… dick riding him to the sky, karma farm”, as Discord member VRAXX so delicately put it. ;)

The comments hurt the most. People were treating him like he had personally single-handedly preserved film history. Look at what people were saying:

Pineapplesaintreal: “What a hero”
JBBfromPG: “Incredible!! Thank you!!”
Chadder-Cheeze: “This is amazing. Thank you!”
sparrowhawkward: “The second coming of Drew’s Script-o-Rama”
roqqingit: “GOAT!!!”

They thought they were thanking a solitary, hard-working creator who spent years building something from scratch.

The Claims and the Reality

Mike didn’t take time. He used AI to scrape. He used automated tools to steal a decade of human effort. Then, he had the absolute audacity to say:

“...it now has over 11,700 movie and TV scripts, more than any other site that I’m aware of.”

Script Hive has 26,660. You have an active account there, Mike. You were aware.

“A few things that I think make it nicer than the alternatives: Everything is completely free (no signup required, no paywalls, no nonsense).”

We’re also completely free. We also have no paywalls. Which you also knew.

“This is a personal passion project and I’m actively improving it”

A personal passion project. It makes me feel physically ill.

Many people contribute to Script Hive. What Mike took credit for doesn’t just hurt me personally. It hurts the community that built this resource. It hurts the VIP members who contribute to the Patreon. It hurts the curators who scour the internet daily, sometimes even personally scanning hard copies of screenplays to add them to the digital collective. It hurts the indexers who sit and manually, one by one, add metadata like writer names, draft dates, and story credits to make our database easy to search for other writers. This hurts the countless people who email me scripts as they find them, because they trust Script Hive as a trusted educational resource.

Script Hive has been a labor of love for 10 YEARS.

And Mike was being lauded as a HERO.

The Ouch Factor: No Film School

Gah, that hurts. No Film School caught wind of the thread. They were actually preparing to write an article about the database that stole from us.

Ouch.

The reality check hit me: We once emailed No Film School politely asking them to add Script Hive to their list of screenplay resources. They never even responded. Now, they were about to promote the thief.

It’s upsetting how many people just don’t know that Script Hive exists. I can’t blame writers for that. I have probably been too careful about protecting this resource over the years. I’ve focused on the quality of the database, the accuracy of the information (unlike Mike…many of his automated links brought up the wrong screenplay, but hey, he automated movie posters!).

I focused on the strength of our community rather than marketing.

Turning a Negative into a Positive

The community on Discord (and my family) helped me get through this. It was a very upsetting experience, but talking about it in our VIP only channel was therapeutic.

But they didn’t just provide comfort; they provided action. They went into the Reddit thread and started pointing out the truth.

The Discord community helped me find Mike’s contact info so I could ensure all his emails were blacklisted from our database. (This doesn’t stop him from using VPNs, but we have implemented far better measures to prevent automated scraping now).

I emailed Jason from No Film School. I requested that when he writes that article, he consider crediting Script Hive, since the majority of the scripts came directly from us. Understandably, Jason didn’t want to get caught in the middle of a messy internet dispute. But he agreed that what Mike did was wrong. He shared in my righteous anger. He decided not to write the article about Mike’s site.

In fact, he offered to write an article about Script Hive instead! Score!

This situation made me realize we need to completely overhaul our marketing plan. Too many people are unaware of Script Hive. Our social media accounts are getting zero traction. We are listed as a resource on the Writer’s Guild Foundation page and a few other blogs, but that is clearly not enough.

The community has been reaching out to me with some great ideas on how we can spread the word, like reaching out to film and writing professors. If you have ideas, I would love to hear them! The positive outcome is that I feel invigorated to CHANGE our marketing. This whole situation forced me to realize we needed to do this.

Mike Reaches Out

Remember I told you he’s in our Discord? Well, he sent me a direct message admitting to the whole thing:

I checked his site to confirm, and he did indeed pull down the 9,000 scripts.

However, he did NOT take down his Reddit post, nor did he update it to tell the thousands of people upvoting him where the data actually came from. The “hero” narrative remained live on the homepage of the subreddit…and was steadily rising.

Saturday, July 11th: A Damn Good Day

Then, the Reddit moderators stepped in.

They looked at the evidence, removed the post entirely, and BANNED Mike from the screenwriting subreddit.

Okay, gotta admit, I wasn’t expecting quick justice, but it felt damn good.

Thank you, Reddit mods. I’m sure that was an interesting conversation to have behind the scenes. After all, neither myself nor Mike own any of these materials. It’s about the time put into collecting everything into one place. So on behalf of the entire Script Hive community, including curators, indexers, moderators, developers, and VIP members: Thank you.

And to [REDACTED REAL NAME].... Fuck you!

~~You may have noticed I did not shy away from using Mike’s various names and usernames in this post. That’s because I believe in giving credit where credit is due.~~

UPDATE (7/14/26): Mike pleaded for me to remove his real name and email. He has removed his site completely and taken a beating on Reddit, so after waiting a few days, I decided to do that. Perhaps it’s the Canadian in me…

Smish.

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FADE OUT! Keep writing, keep hustling, and see you around the Hive!

Script Hive

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