This week Weblogs.us encountered a sad first. It involves violations of the TOS, and subsequent suspension of the accounts in question. We had an influx of ‘UK’ based blogger request accounts so they could blog on the topics of ‘health’, ‘beauty’, and ‘sexual health’. The email requests all appeared to be from a template, awkwardly warm greeting, fake pseudonym, referred to our service as our “blogging platform”, and they all wanted to talk about ‘health’, ‘beauty’, and ‘sexual health’.
JD had granted a few of them blogs, all of which have now been suspended. What tipped us off to issues was one of the spam bloggers complained that they could not make any posts. Before looking at the error logs, I knew it was a mod_security rule that had been tripped. Sure enough, upon inspection it was. However, what tripped mod_security was interesting. Instead of the common anti-injection attack filters, it was the anti-spam filters. The logs revealed another interesting tidbit, the user behind one of the blogs was behind another newly hosted blog by Weblogs.us.
After looking at the exact content that they attempted to post, I did a quick Google search, and found they had just copied and pasted an article by someone else, and claimed it as their own. I immediately suspended their account for plagiarism. The funny thing is the user contacted us wondering why his/her blog was suspended. Apparently, he/she agreed to our TOS without reading it.
Plagiarism, as with copyright infringement in general, is prohibited on Weblogs.us. Depending on the extent of the violation, the blog may be suspended immediately, and without notice. This particularly applies to verbatim copying of content from other sources without citation of the source.
-John Havlik
[end of transmission, stay tuned]