Just a waring to those thinking of using paidposting.net. The person they used to post in my forum cut and pasted a lot of his posts from another forum. The posts were all exactly the same word for word and I now have to delete them or face potential duplicate content issues and even legal action. The poster has asked for another chance but I have requested a refund.
I had a writer do that to us 2 weeks ago. It was a crazy thing to do because we supply our writers with hoards of work every week and the exact moment we find out the content is purely copied and pasted that writer will no longer write for us. Other tricks that people will try is putting an article into a free translation tool to another language then changing it back to English.
At least if they did that it wouldn't be an exact duplicate. I am sure they will regret their actions once this thread ranks for paidposting, paid posting and paid posting sucks and paidposting sucks.
It's funny that you've brought this up because today I'm looking into integrating copyscape on the backend of our website to flag any copied content as soon as a writer sends it to us. All being well a writer will upload their articles to the backend and it will immediately email us if a writer has copied anything which copyscape has flagged. I'm also going to see if I can build some sort of script to check if there are any pattern matches with chunks of words found on Google searches.
Cool. Before I found your service I was looking into another provider of unique articles. They had a great site with all the articles listed so you could browse and buy them. As soon as you paid for the article it was removed from the site so nobody else could buy it. I pointed out to them that all these 'unique' articles on their site were being indexed in Google so were not going to be unique but they didn't seem to think it was a problem!
We tried providing a forum posting service but the rates that are being paid for forum posting are so low that we would not be able to pay our writers enough to make it worth their while. Perhaps half the problem of forum posting gigs is that to get quality posts you really need people posting who want to post rather than those trying to make a living out of it.
Update: paidposting have been very good and refunded my money and fired the poster. At least the customer service is better than the conduct of their employees.
How is this a trick, the article would be a grammatical nightmare? You don't proof the content I guess. I run my articles through two real editors, plagiarism checks, copyscape, and if a word is spelled wrong it is rejected. Not to mention something more serious and the writer is banned.
Its not hard to steal an article to get by copyscape... you must run other forms of checking. A common way is taking old magazine articles that are not online... if you get busted with this your going to have all kinds of legal issues. If your serious about content you need to but better checking practices in place.
Just refused to pay another guy (feb.25.07) as he copied all 100 of his posts from a different forum. My plan of not paying until after the work was done is looking like its a good idea. I should also take action against them to cover my time in removing their posts and to cover any potential legal action in the future.
For some reason you seem to be taking what I've said as a personal attack on yourself. First of all we would never accept articles which have poor grammar. The first comment I made about "a trick" was information passed on from an associate of mine who buys huge amounts of bulk content at rock bottom prices. He doesnt care whether the content is grammatically correct or not. I would have expected someone who deals with "constant content" to be a little more diligent in getting their facts straight before making false accusations about another businesses practises. Plagiarism is a very real concern for us and we currently run checks with copyscape and google. As soon as we find anyone copying material whether or not it is 5 words or 1000 words we stop using their services immediately. While we use contracted writers we currently give the majority of our writers around 30 hours work a week and we constantly remind them that if they are caught copying any material their source of work will be terminated. Our writers are highly motivated and love to write. Our biggest concerns are with the new writers and for the first several assignments we monitor their work for spelling, grammar, consistancy in language used and plagiarism. You can catch writers copying material if their language from one article to the next differs hugely. The odd time we have found writers who have been sharing work with their friends this way. Nevertheless, I feel you have been a little heavy handed with your criticisms of our services, from a few comments I've made about a "forum posting service" and I hope anyone who reads my defence will agree that the criticisms were unjust.
Very nice tool mate! I've already built a tool which plugs all our assigned articles into copyscape as the writers upload them. In the works is a script which will go through an article and search for chunks of text on Google. It's still at the planning stage but I'll keep you posted with the script.
Accusations? I was simply trying to understand your problem and help with it by recommending a couple solutions. Sorry you took it the wrong way.
That was the part which I thought was a little condescending. Anyone coming into this forum might look at your comment and assume that Weirfire doesn't proof read assignments which we carry out for our clients. This is not the case at all. In fact, in the event that a client is unhappy with grammar or content of an assignment, we have the article rewritten or changed immediately - no questions asked. I appreciate your suggestions regarding copying and I aknowledged that is in fact a concern for us. Your point about magazine articles is a valid one. Do you think it would be possible to have writers sign a disclaimer which says they are responsible for the content they write and if they are found copying any material word for word then they are the ones which are responsible legally for the content?
The issue would lie with accountability. A lot of freelance forum posters and article writers don't have a huge amount of money so the person taking legal action would probably target the site owner rather than (or as well as) the writer.
It may help if writers sign a contract but this will not help you with overseas writers. Most writers over seas know that can't be touched or held to any US contract. There is always the software the collages use for checking for plagiarism. These check plagiarism in published documents as well as online.