Award Winning, Managing Editor of WPMU Dev Is Probably Copy-Pasting Articles

[justnorris]

WPMUdev blog article has a couple links that actually belong to WPExplorer ( that look like http://wpexlorer.com/go/referal-site-slug and are redirecred to WPExlorer referal link), which made me WPMUdev is copy-pasting at least some of their content from around the web.

So I decided to let WPExplorer know, and tweeted @WPExplorer. Soon after, I discovered, that WPExplorer is actually following me, so I deleted the tweet and sent a DM on Twitter instead.

The next day, suddenly @WPMUdev on Twitter wakes up and starts asking me to provide the link of the article to "further investigate the accusation". To which I politely declined a couple of times. At the time I didn't realize that the link has been long cached in archive.org and I wanted to give WPExplorer time to decide on his own what to do about that before WPMU "inspects" the issue.

I'm very disappointed seeing such behavior from a huge site like WPMUdev. I was under the assumption that copy pasting articles was what low level "SEO hacking" sites do, not the "big guys".

Isn't this shameful amongst blogs and websites ? Is it okay to publish "inspired" ( or copied ) content without mentioning the original author ?

As @TimothyBowers said, I could have emailed them directly, but instead I started a public conversation ( https://twitter.com/TimothyKBowers/status/666362562666172417 ). Because of it I guess I am obligated to provide WPMUdev with all the details that they require or they won't leave me be on Twitter. Well - You wanted it public, you got it.

Twitter conversation: https://twitter.com/justnorris/status/666363207557189632 Link to the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20150421051207/https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/10-drag-and-drop-page-builders-wordpress/

p.s. I am by no means a writer, so excuse my writing style and form. Thank you for reading through my public rant :)

[detaro]

The article you think they copied is http://www.wpexplorer.com/best-builder-wordpress/ ?

I couldn't find any actually duplicated text?

They are similar, but what do you expect from this kind of site? A list of products, a short blurb for each, an introduction. I'd guess every bigger WP site has an article similar to these.

Yes, it is possible the WPMUdev author saw the other article and thought "Good idea, should write an article like that", but the timing could be coincidence as well. And even if they did, they didn't directly copy it. And if it was coincidence, I can understand they are pissed

[timbowers → detaro]

Hey, Detaro.

Thanks for commenting, that pretty much seems to sum up what happened here. A lots of fuss about nothing, really.

Have a great day! :)

[timbowers]

Hmmm.... So, their article:

http://www.wpexplorer.com/best-builder-wordpress/

Written by Tom Ewer, he writes for us too. In fact, Tom originally started working for us a number of years back, there is bound to be some cross over ;)

He's a great guy, met up with him in real life a couple of times. If you enjoyed his article, check out his latest one with us here:

http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/buddypress-interactive-plugi...

And our article which you compared with:

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/10-drag-and-drop-page-build...

Content is unique, as are the images. Three links appear to go through WPExplorer which would imply to me that they were a source whilst researching our article. Really sorry to WPExplorer for sending traffic through their link, we've corrected that for them.

It's natural that content will overlap, especially for popular themes and plugins or where companies share authors writing for both sites. Companies will also naturally use each other as inspiration, especially in a close community.

Not sure that really warranted all the commotion, you really could have just emailed them and CC'd us so that we could correct this matter. No need to make us chase, worrying that one of our staff had simply scraped content, which, of course, would not be cool. Your original tweet"@WPExplorer I’m pretty sure WPMUdev stole a part of an article from you. DM me I’ll send you a link." implied we'd scraped a chunk of their article and stole their work, that was a bit harsh really.

Oh well, thanks for letting us know in the end. Next time feel free to just reach out, we're all human and we can all work together.

Have a fantastic day. :)

[justnorris → timbowers]

Thank you for pulling out that tweet from deleted Twitter history and posting it here.

Of course content is going to overlap, however, affiliate links specific to a single site do not.

A part of your staff added a WPexplorer link in an article of your instead of the actual link. That link wouldn't appear there unless there were some copy pasting going on, the details don't matter, I saw the end result, and commented on it based on the information available.

p.s. Tom Ewer is Raelene Morey ? The post is attributed to Raelene Morey, so I'm not quite sure I understand why are you explaining how nice of a guy Tom is in real life. I'm sure he is, but the article isn't written by him.

Have a fantastic day yourself, today I learned a couple of things about the internet, thank you for that, I truly appreciate all your time spent on the discussion with me.

[timbowers → justnorris]

Tom Ewer writes for Rae, she's the editor at WPMU DEV. ;)

They regularly converse about all the articles they both write for their profession. Don't you see the connection between articles written for both companies?

Still a lot about nothing really. A couple of links were copied whilst researching, but the content was all unique for both sites.

Cheers.

[justnorris → timbowers]

I never expected you to admit that there might be a slightest sliver of copy paste here. Your explanations are very believable, if you want to believe them.

Anyway, I never realized that it was the proper way to write articles on the web. I also didn't know that editors sometimes claim ownership over articles that someone else wrote. As I said - I'm not a writer, so I learnt a lot today.

There is a lot of gray area. You want people to find you on "page builders" on Google, and so did WPExplorer, so you both hired the same guy to write the same article, with different wording, images, and a couple different items in the article.

So, the take-away for me is: Same Author, Same story with different wording and graphics = perfectly acceptable form of content authorship. I get it now - It's not your fault, it's the way the world works, for example, peeps at HTC were very inspired by iPhone 6: https://www.google.com/search?q=htc+that+looks+like+iphone

I just didn't know the same principles apply everywhere, but I'm noticing that trend more & more in lots of different areas of business.

All good, Cheers.