Report Author Tool Update

For almost 2 years now, we’ve given our users the ability to REPORT AUTHORS who they believe are violating our terms of service in some way. To date, out of over 80,000+ authors, 150 have been reported for various reasons.

What happens when an author is reported to us, you ask?

• We investigate the legitimacy of their complaint and the legitimacy of the person doing the complaint.
• We investigate the member being reported by reviewing their account history, articles and interactions with us.
• If we determine it’s just a competitor trying to bring harm, we’ll ignore the complaint.
• If we determine there is good reason to believe the reporter, we’ll suspend the account from future submissions or suspend the account pending further investigation (locks the account down) for further review.
• Sometimes there are accusations where we’ll email the author to clarify the origin of their content submitted.
• A handful of the complaints told us that one of our members ripped them off and won’t give them their money back for something they purchased from them.
• Other times, we’re working to determine if we’re a good match between the member and EzineArticles.com.

I hope you can understand that there is another layer of efforts we do with this “Report Author” tool that I can’t be transparent about in order to protect our members and ourselves from those who would wish to discredit their competition…and for other reasons.

What I can tell you is that we take every complaint seriously and do our best to investigate thoroughly before making any action decisions based on the reports. Internally, we have an unpublished escalation procedure when a termination decision has been made so that more than one person of seniority on our team is involved to prevent bad decisions.

Posted by Christopher M. Knight on January 15, 2008 at 1:57 pm

Views 387 |

7 Comments »

1

Albert Hallado writes:

Hi Chris,

Great job Chris, this is a pretty cool tool (REPORT AUTHORS) makes EA safer and prevent from those abuse the EA.

Thank You Chris,
Albert Hallado

Comment provided January 15, 2008 at 3:22 pm

2

Christopher M. Knight writes:

All,

We just realized that the REPORT AUTHOR link was only on the extended author bio and that means any author who didn’t have an extended author bio, wasn’t reportable.

This has been changed today so that every author can be reported.

I’m always amazed at the efficiency of the net to identify when something is out of whack and this is an important tool to protect the reputation of all involved.

Comment provided January 15, 2008 at 3:27 pm

3

Susan Scharfman writes:

Considering the amount of scams, fraud and fakery in this imperfect world, 150 out of 80,000 is not bad. No doubt there will be more. Thank you for the policing policy. In the broader publishing world plagiarists still manage to wiggle through the cracks with six figures in the bank. Hats Off to you and the team.

Comment provided January 15, 2008 at 5:22 pm

4

Chinmay Chakravarty writes:

If an author uses a ghost writer and when that ghost writer himself/herself reports on that author for plagiarizing, then what?

Well, one purpose of this question is to know if some established authors do, in fact, use ghost writers.

Comment provided January 16, 2008 at 8:05 am

5

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Chinmay,

This happens about once a month… (conflicts between authors and ghostwriters gone bad)

Authors who use ghost writers are treated as 2nd class here on EzineArticles.com.

We’d suspend the authors account and most likely remove the articles that were claimed to be plagiarized (regardless as to whether they were or not).

We don’t take risks with content. It’s a central theme internally.

Comment provided January 16, 2008 at 9:01 am

6

P.Pal writes:

The best way to deal with this is never to hire ghost writers. You can never trust anyone but yourself so why risk it with ghost writers. Article writing might be difficult at first but you would learn with time.

Comment provided January 16, 2008 at 10:31 am

7

Christopher M. Knight writes:

Wow…

After making it easier for everyone to report authors, the number of complaints went up 200% overnight.

Comment provided January 16, 2008 at 12:17 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

BLOG COMMENT POLICY
© EzineArticles.com - All Rights Reserved Worldwide.