I am relatively new to all this Internet marketing and SEO stuff, so apologies in advance if this is a bit of a 'noobish' topic. I'd appreciate all your advice nonetheless. Over the course of the past week I have been doing a lot of forum posting to help promote my first project, my Paintball blog. No annoying spam, just relevant and helpful contributions to ongoing discussions. I have just found a new forum that I could join so I decided to take a quick look around. To my surprise I found an exact copy of one of my blog posts. Great, free promotion! Well, not exactly. No link to my original blog post and no credit given whatsoever. I am little annoyed to say the least. What should I do or should this be expected and simply left alone? Thank you all in advance.
Recently I hired people to post in a new forum. Two of the posters hired copied hundreds of posts from other forums and websites word for word. I complained to paypal about one company (paidposting.net) and refused to pay the other guy (feb.25.07). It seems that a lot of people hire forum posters to pad out new forums. These posters seem to need the concept of copyright explaining. If you email the forum they will probably be pleased to take the content down and should be able to get a refund on the forum posting (assuming this was where the issue came from).
I cannot find an email address, the forum administrators conveniently have their email addresses in their forum profiles hidden. Nothing is mentioned on the website itself and a quick WHOIS yields nothing either. In the mean time I have sent the forum administrator a message via their private message function, hopefully I will receive a response. In the event of me not hearing from them, what should I do next?