Writing post after post and never getting featured? Discouraged that the same bloggers are always getting featured? Want to get your post featured? Just steal someone's content! That seems to be the growing trend on ActiveRain for making it to the feature board.
Over the last few weeks I've come across a few posts that were featured on ActiveRain that were plagiarized. They were NOT the bloggers' original content and they content was copied and pasted verbatim from the original author. If you find a good article that you want to share, share it but do NOT plagiarize it and pass it off as your own content. At the very least have enough common sense to change it up a bit, add a few words, switch the paragraphs around! ADD ORIGINAL CONTENT! YOUR ORIGINAL CONTENT! Don't just copy and paste it, play it off as your own and then be proud of yourself when you see the little yellow star!!! You should be ashamed! When I want to share someone's content that's not on ActiveRain where I can just re-blog it, I tweet it or share it through Facebook. If an outside website allows for "re-blogging", you must follow the instructions given and/or give credit to the original author.
You see that little box that pops up right before you publish your post? The one that asks you to please confirm that this entry does NOT contain copyrighted material that you don't have permission to reprint? Does it look familiar?
Do you see that line with the check box, yeah the one right above that specifically states: This is not my content but I have permission to repost it. Did you check the box? No, of course you didn't because by checking that box, you will not be awarded any points and it's all about the points, isn't it???
Did you think those final two warnings before hitting publish weren't meant for you? NEWSFLASH: They were meant exactly for you.
Hooray for you, you beat the point system! You beat out all the members of the ActiveRain Community who put a lot of time and effort into creating their own content. You copied someone else's content and you FINALLY got your feature post....
For those of you who don't know, when you see these symbols on a featured post, it means the writer may have gotten featured but it was later revealed it was copyrighted material and not his/her own content although still on the feature board (which I don't agree with); still able to be re-blogged (which I don't agree with because you are now reblogging plagiarized content) the points were retracted.
You want to get your post featured? I'm sure you do but stealing someone else's original content is NOT the answer!
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