June 6, 2016 at 7:29 am

@4cryingoutloud Much of the issue stems from the fact that banking standards differ from one country to another, or that a license to distribute media only covers a single country. Licensing is expensive, but in the US the population makes it worthwhile. Canada has only 1/10 of your population, many of whom speak mostly French. So our market is small, and often not able to compensate for the fees.

June 6, 2016 at 7:25 am

@grecy095 I am very sorry to lean of the extent to which this user plagiarized you. And you are not the only one!

I believe this person may not read or write English, and has just been told by someone how to manipulate the system here by copying and pasting. That means someone understood enough to know how moderation works here. Maybe that person is even a member, urging others to cheat from the site.

Shame on anyone who does this! And please, we need the staff to get on this. I have reported the situation many hours ago, and now some plagiarized content is even appearing on Google’s site index. I think it’s harmful not to take immediate action.

June 6, 2016 at 5:09 am

There are now dozens of plagiarized articles on the site, which have been published because the plagiarist took advantage of the freedom to post in the forums without moderation. Some of these texts are already indexed with Google. All will have to be painstakingly removed from the site and from Google’s index. Where is @support and @admin?

This massive act of plagiarism is a challenge to the current practice of allowing all users to post freely in the forum, while even the posts of experienced and valued writers on this site are moderated. The security measure was obviously taken with the best of intentions. But I don’t think it works.

On the one hand, it delays content from publishing for sometimes 24 or even 48 hours. It creates an artificial gap in the workflow, because every post must be approved and the staff are not able to keep up with demand. It demoralizes many of the most active users on the site, and it prevents any of us from publishing timely content on the hottest of trending topics. So that hurts the search rankings of the site, or at least removes a potential for them to be better.

On the other hand, this plagiarist has proven that it’s possible to publish page upon page upon page of content that hurts the site. These plagiarized Wikipedia articles are indexing! Google will notice the duplicate content and the fact that staff did not respond to the problem promptly. Some of this content has been sitting in the forum for over a day. For some, it might be close to two days. Combined with the dozens and dozens of illegal Shutterstock images on LiteracyBase, it’s getting to be a big problem. And it points to the staff not being able to cope with the job of moderating content. Too much is getting past you guys, so is the current system worth keeping?

My suggestion is this:

Moderate only new users and those for whom appropriate content may be an issue. allow minimal posting in the forum, but apply plagiarism check to forum content and institute a maximum number of posts, forum threads and comments for moderated members in order to limit potential harm to the site.

Remove trusted writers from moderation so their posts can be published upfront without being checked. You can always verify afterwards for the purpose of payment, or to be sure there were no violations. But this way, there will be a more constant flow of fresh content on the site, which both human readers and search engines will appreciate.

Your writers will also be more motivated to write if they know their posts will publish instantly. And this privilege can be used as an incentive to get writers to create more SEO-friendly content. Keep people on moderation if they aren’t producing the kind of content you want. Their posts will still publish, just more slowly. It will encourage people to work on their writing skills. You could even choose a single skill set each week, and ask for improvements in just that area. I think with the calibre of member in this group, you’d see a wonderful result from such a program!

So that’s my two cents on the matter. I don’t say it to be mean, but I think we need to be realistic about what staff can and can’t handle. Right now, the list of things you aren’t handling appropriately is unfortunately growing, and you need a plan to reverse that process. I hope you’ll choose to take a bit of a risk, that could potentially pay off big for the site and all the users too.

June 6, 2016 at 1:45 am

I wish Amazon Prime in Canada had all the cool features you get in the US! Here there isn’t the whole streaming service, and I’m not even sure that they offer the free shipping. I think it’s just a few minor discounts. It didn’t really seem worth it at all.

June 6, 2016 at 1:35 am

@morgoodie I made that one in Canva, but I opened the graphic in GIMP to use the eyedropper tool. I find I do this quite frequently now, rather than creating the whole design in GIMP. It’s just quicker to do some things in Canva 😀

June 6, 2016 at 1:32 am

Good grief! Where is support? I went away for a couple of hours and I come back to discover this user is just pumping out the plagiarized texts one after the other. His name as given on the site is “abiola fayemi” and the usename – minus the @ for linkage – is “fascogold.” This person really needs removing from the site, as he is filling the forum up with stolen content from multiple web sites.

June 5, 2016 at 9:49 pm

I finally made a graphic to promote the challenge!

[caption id="attachment_8902" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Find the Flowers in Your Name – #WritingChallenge #flowers[/caption]

June 5, 2016 at 9:38 pm

Every site eventually gets people who try to break the rules. I’m just glad it hasn’t been an issue until now.

June 5, 2016 at 8:48 pm

@swalia This may be the reason for no ads at the moment. I believe the admin are from Asia. Someone had mentioned Pakistan, but I thought I had read somewhere on the site that the owners were from somewhere in Southeast Asia.

June 5, 2016 at 8:12 pm

@swalia Yes, I have also heard that earning is very difficult with InfoLinks. I’ve heard mixed reviews of VigLink, and I’m really not that much up on advertising at the moment. This article lists a bunch of possible sources for ads. I wonder if any would work here?

Which 5 Ad Servers Will Make You More Money in 2016

I’m sure that getting AdSense would help. But as so many writing sites have been cut off by Google without warning, I wonder if maybe the admin want to establish the site a little better and ensure lots of quality content before they apply. I think that’s a good strategy for a site with multiple authors, especially when many are new to blogging and web writing.

June 5, 2016 at 7:59 pm

@peachpurple I always love your food photos! You’re just using your camera on your phone for that? I was sure you had a fancy digital camera!

Your photos are really gorgeous. They look like they were taken by a professional food photographer. I don’t think they need much editing, but I know a lot of food bloggers like to sort of frame their images and add text. This is especially effective for the ones you want the reader to share on Pinterest.

Now that the issue with inline images is resolved, you’ll notice I have started to add long images in my posts again. They are 735 x 1,102 pixels, the optimal size for Pinterest. Since most of the images I want to use are wider than tall, I like to use a collage for Pinterest (PicMonkey is awesome for this, and you can even do it without registering for an account!) I also sometimes just put the photo in the middle with text above and below, or at the bottom with text and other graphic elements like a sticker that says, “Pin me!”

There is a lot of room for creativity. I’m sure you can do beautiful things with a graphics editor 😀

June 5, 2016 at 7:46 pm

@morgoodie I know exactly what you mean! Enjoy 😀

June 5, 2016 at 7:45 pm

@peachpurple I certainly was lucky! I loved my birthing unit 😀

Perhaps if more ladies in your country would lobby the doctors and the hospitals, you could have this sort of setup too? I think it only came about in North America because many women demanded it, and some were leaving the system entirely to have their babies at home with a midwife. That would have been my choice when I had my kids, but it wasn’t legal where I lived.

June 5, 2016 at 7:05 pm

@morgoodie I knew you were the type to get excited about a new tool, and to become very involved with it!

If your text isn’t showing up against the background, be sure it’s on a separate layer from the image. You can fade the background, if this is appropriate. Or you can add a third layer between text and background. Draw a box just about the size of the text, and fill it with a colour that contrasts with your text. This can also be faded, to allow more of your image to show through.

June 5, 2016 at 7:02 pm

@bestwriter I can identify with the time and effort you put into making the post special. I know that I often do the same.

When a post you worked hard on doesn’t pay off as well as you’d hoped, it feels like an even greater disappointment. But this too is part of the writing challenge. We must decide whether we are writing for fun, to develop a skill, or because we want a good readership and higher pay. Sometimes we sacrifice one thing in order to have another, so it must be a choice.