Crackdown On Automated Writings and Submissions
Posted by Editing StaffWe hate having to make public posts like this one, because the vast majority of our users are upstanding members producing quality content to share with visitors, however it is for the protection of those same outstanding members that we must occasionally post reminders on what is and isn’t acceptable here at Content Caboodle.
Our editors have recently noticed a massive spike in submissions of obvious automated nature. While our submission guidelines remain very liberal, we do not allow machine-written content nor automated submission software to be used for mass submitting of articles.
Unfortunately, some of the people using these tactics apparently think their use of spin-text machine-written content and automated submission software is undetectable. We are partially to blame for this misconception as in the past our policy has been to simply decline such submissions without public comment.
The truth however, is that almost 100% of machine-written articles and automated submissions are detectable, and this posting serves as notice that going forward not only will we continue to decline these submissions, but we will begin banning all accounts associated with them without notification or warning.
Our actions may seem harsh, but the reality is we must do this to protect our service for the upstanding members who submit quality articles and our visiting guests.
Over the past week, more than half of the articles that our editors manually reviewed were obviously machine-written or auto-submitted by repeat offenders. We can not continue to allow our editors to spend so much valuable time on illegitimate submissions as it takes away from the time they can give to our members who play by the rules.
For that reason we will have a zero-tolerance policy going forward with regards to machine-written content and the use of automated submission software.
We will not disclose all of our methods for detecting such submissions, however we will share some of the most obvious reasons red flags are raised to help our legitimate members avoid undue scrutiny by our editing staff.
1. Does your article make sense? We understand that English is not the native language of all our members, and we have always maintained that slight grammar errors or broken English was acceptable provided that the meaning of the article was clear for readers. That hasn’t changed, however if we see a sentence such as “Did you often frequently sometimes seek and look for…” then there’s a good chance your account is about to be banned.
2. Don’t use automated-submission software. Believe it or not (at your own peril), almost all of the automated article submission programs on the market leave a footprint when used that we and other content sites can easily see. Just because some article directories don’t take the time or bother to check for these footprints shouldn’t lead you to believe they don’t exist, they do and we’re watching for them. If we see them in your article, your account is in jeopardy.
The bottom line is every single submission made to Content Caboodle does get reviewed by a human editor before going live on our site, and our editors as well as our software are very good at finding the rule breakers. We run internal tests on a weekly basis to test our editing process and constantly add rules and measures to improve the accuracy with which illegitimate submissions are caught.
As stated, in the past our policy has been to quietly decline such submissions, but going forward we will also ban the accounts associated with them to stop the repeat offenses to ensure our editors have more time for our valued members.
