Minor pre-publication corrections must be submitted within a narrow time frame, according to Ezine’s communication to me. The emails I sent using my usual email account came back to me. They bounced and had a system message attached to them saying my account has been blocked.

 I then sent several brief messages to Ezine using their internal mail system reminding them I tried to send the corrections during the appropriate time frame but my email bounced. I asked for a clarification.

I have not received any messages from Ezine in close to 24 hours. They might be freezing me out. or they might be taking my criticism seriously and discussing them in several offices. Take your pick.

I sent one message to Ezine over their internal mail system this morning reminding them there is outstanding business which needs to be resolved. I asked the disposition of my account and articles.

This last inquiry was sent only minutes ago so naturally there’s no response yet. I’ll let you know what happens next.

Each article has minor glitches and I correctd each of the minor glitches in about a minute or so each. None of the articles I resubmitted today was the article which prompted their suspension and subsequent reinstatement of my account. I also received word that another article was accepted without any hitches.

As I wrote, I resubmitted three articles after small corrections. All three resubmissions were returned to me by Google with a message saying my account has been blocked by the intended recipient. In this case the intended recipient was the dispute resolution email inbox of ezinearticles.com.

I resubmitted two of the rejected resubmissions. These two emails were also returned to me with a message that the intended recipent blocked my account.

It is possible that there is an innocent explanation for the bounced emails. I have not received responses to emails I sent yesterday to the same address. Perhaps I will get responses.

I certainly hope I get responses and the reason for the bounces is innocent. If not, I will keep ezinearticles’s back office busy [not by spamming but by sending appropriate inquiries about their odd behavior].

I submitted an article. Ezine suspended my account and accused me of plagiarism. I showed them proof I did not plagiarize. They reinstated my account. We have been trading emails since then. I am not satisfied with their responses.

Perhaps some day soon I will copy and paste our correspondence. If there’s enough interest, I’ll do the work necessary to inform everyone. In the meanwhile, here’s a summary:

When the Ezine editors get a submission which they believe is plagiarized they suspend the account of the submitter. Then they give the submitter the opportunity to prove her or his innocence. I have called this a ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ policy.

From what I understand of their emails, Ezine justifies this policy by claiming it protects their system from being accused of plagiarism.

I have written back to Ezine stating that protecting against plagiarism is a laudable goal, but there are additional issues in play.

An article submitter might have submitted many articles in the past which have been screened and accepted by Ezine. While these screened and accepted articles are available to everyone on the net, Ezine itself benefits from the articles. The articles appear on a page  which also has advertising. If someone clicks the advertising, Ezine gets money.

If Ezine decides to suspend an author’s account because, let’s say for the sake of this discussion, the 63rd article the author submitted is suspected of being plagiarized, every article the author has written and has been screened until #63 is now also suspended. In other words, the body of work of the author, not just the single suspected article, is taken away from the author and placed in a locked box. The author gets no benefit from work which has previously been screened and accepted.

While the author gets no benefit, Ezine gets benefit. From Ezine’s end it is possible Ezine might suspend the author’s entire work from their screen. But the internet is not instantaneous. Let’s say Ezine suspends an account on a Monday. The author’s articles still appear out in cyberspace long after the suspension on that fateful Monday. Let’s say that on Wednesday a surfer finds one of the author’s articles after a Google search. The surfer might click on one of the advertisments and Ezine might gets some money as a result of the click. The author gets nothing but a nasty email from Ezine.

I have claimed in one of my emails to Ezine that their policy of suspending first and asking questions later amounts to theft. They steal something from the author and benefit from their theft.

Note that all the while the author’s single suspect article has not yet been PROVEN to be plagiarized. Ezine suspends accounts on the basis of suspicion, not evidence. But during the pendency of the suspension ‘trial’ the author loses control of her or his article while Ezine gains potential benefit.

Note also that the article which Ezine suspects might be plagiarised does not yet appear on their website and is not yet available to the public. The article has been submitted by the author and sits on the desk of an Ezine editor prior to approval and publication. Ezine has not been hurt in the least if an author submits a plagiarised article, yet Ezine penalizes an author regardless. Only the author get hurt, not Ezine, if an author has actually or is suspected of submitting a plagiarised article.

Until Ezine finds a more equitable way of dealing with plagiarism and the suspicion of plagiarism I will continue my correspondence with them. If they fail to take corrective action I will take more serious steps to get them to change their inequitable policy.

Now you can resume reading and studying my articles.

In any case, I have come up with at least one lesson from this debacle. The lesson is: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

If you are an article writer you might be tempted to concentrate your efforts in a few places. You might be sending your articles to ezinearticles.com and one or two other article aggregators. Of all the aggregators around, it is my understanding that the one with the highest Page Rank, and therefore the highest possibility of increasing your rank juice, is Ezinearticles.com. Indeed, I am aware of a decent moneymaking outfit that suggests narrowing down submissions to Ezine alone, don’t even bother with the others.

I can now say I have learned from experience that contributing articles to only a tiny handful of article submission websites is a BIG MISTAKE. And following NPC’s advice to contribute only to Ezine is a BIGGER MISTAKE.

If you put all your eggs in one or two baskets it is possible that at the press of a single button in the headquarters of your aggregator partner that you could be wiped out, obliterated, consigned to deep cyberspace. And they may or may not correct their error.

I read on their website that some people have contributed over a thousand articles to Ezine. Figure that at the rate of one article per hour, that represents a thousand hours of work by this contributor. Imagine this account could be annihilated by a random keystroke of a deranged Ezine employee. A thousand hours of work lost. In my case I was a relative newbie at Ezine. The work lost by me amounts to a week’s work, not a thousand hour’s work. Peanuts by comparison. But not a loss I gladly sustain.

The moral of the story: spread your article submission goodness around and survive more electronic earthquakes to live another day.

Like most articles websites, Ezine has its standards. Originality is one of its most important standards. The articles they publish must be fresh and written for their website alone and no one else. Because their articles are not duplicates of articles posted on other sites, Ezine has a good reputation and a high PR (Page Rank, a disputed term used in Google searches).

A couple of weeks ago the head of Ezine sent a video to its authors. The message was that if the author has old posts lying around on their own personal blogs it is now permissible to brush them up and send them for publication on Ezine. In other words, the article does not have to be 100% new, but it should be from the author’s personal collection and not appear anywhere else.

I fell for this message. I found a nice post I had posted two years ago, polished it up a bit and submitted it to Ezine.

Yesterday, Friday, I got a nasty message that my entire collection of articles on the Ezine website is suspeded and I am being sent to the corner without dinner for the infraction of stealing someone else’s post and trying to foist it off as my own creation. The Ezine editor who handled this submission found my original post on the other website and assumed I stole it. Except it IS my own post. The editor could have verified it is my post by checking the Whois registration data, which is public and available to anyone who bothers to look. But nooooo, this editor shot first and asked questions later …. err, the editor never asked any questions. The editor simply assumed I am guilty of stealing someone else’s work, so penalized me as hard as Ezine can penalize anyone. They cut me off at the knees and sent me packing.

Of course I immediately sent emails back to Ezine with all the data they need to prove the article is my brainstorm and fits the criteria set out in the video their honcho sent out two weeks ago. I am still waiting for a reply. 

I assume they will see the error of their ways and reinstate me ASAP. I will notify my readers when that happens. In the meanwhile, keep my experience in mind when you deal with Ezine.