Hello Friends,
While you have the right to pass judgment as you see fit, below is the story of what happened, why I am thankful, and what actions I have taken and my apology.
What happened :
Currently, I am working on a web page to promote tourism in Danang, Vietnam.
The vision is to provide a place for visitors to learn about attractions in and around Danang, help community projects, and be a hub to unite local Vietnamese and tourists.
The primary way we will attract visitors is from posters in shops and handouts. Not so much targeting SEO and ranking articles on the web. (*It's related to the issue)
To get a first-hand experience of the local areas, I thought it would be best to hire a native Danang local Vietnamese to travel to various locations, take photos, and write about the place. ** Remember this point for later, please.
I put a call out on my FB page looking for a content writer.
Out of everyone who submitted, one person wrote to me and submitted an article they wrote in the past as per my request. I ran that article through the Grammarly plagiarism check, and it came back clean. I also met this person before in person, they were friendly and well-spoken, we got along well. They needed to work as covid was hard on them and their family, it seemed like a win / win.
In talking with them, I stressed the need for original content.
Anyways, I got the articles (the First 3), and they looked good; I had no reason to believe they would be heavily plagiarised.
As the target web page was not trying to gain views from SEO content (*and was on own project), I thought to post the articles first to Travel Feed to help HIVE and Travel feed get better SEO ranking, then RE-Post the pieces to the web page so that the web page would get a minor SEO hit for not posting original content, but that would be ok as SEO was not our path to quire visitors.
At best, I would make back the cost of hiring the content writer, and at worst, HIVE / Travel Feed would get some extra SEO love.
I did spell check and rewrote for continuity the article about the beach in Grammarly and got no hits for plagiarism:
So, at least in my mind, the Vietnamese person I hired followed my ask when I was interviewing them; they confirmed they understood the importance of no Plagiarism; Grammarly picked up no issues on the beach article... so I thought the pieces were good.
I assumed, and that was wrong.
Again, I thought everyone was winning here.
Turns out my assumption on this was and is wrong. :(
So yes, I do have deep disappointment and sadness here.
I really am truly sorry. I worked hard to carve out my place on HIVE, and this is not acceptable.
If you wish to keep me on a black list for this, I accept your judgment. I would ask, however, that you look at my track record as an accurate indicator of my character and intent and the information I posted above about what happened.
I am thankful for this as I was going to hire this author and pay in advance for 20 articles at x2 the rate. Since I did not see any issues in the original article (*The beach one and the one they submitted), I believed they were submitting original content to me.
While I could not catch the plagiarism issues, Hive did, which is great.
I will note be hiring this author.
After posting this article, I will be deleting the content in the plagerised articles.
And replacing it with a link to this post.
I will also be removing those article from my web page I am working on and will not be using them.
Lastly I terminated my working relationship with this author.
It is up to you, and your choice is your choice.
I would ask you to remove the downvotes on my other articles, as I invested a lot of time and effort into them and believed I was taking steps to ensure the content was original and would benefit Hive.
Thank you for your time and attention on this.
Best Regards,
