Hi everyone,

In an effort to maintain the quality of our articles and the integrity of our community we’re doing some cleaning up on eHow.  We want to continue to keep eHow a place where members and visitors come to exchange information and learn from one another.  This is only possible if we maintain unique quality content.  We’ve recently updated our system to detect “clone articles” and “unsuitable articles” in addition to plagiarized articles.

You may be wondering, what is a clone article?  Well as you all know, it is unacceptable on eHow to create multiple articles with the same body of content and different titles. In other words, users are prohibited from essentially publishing the same article repeatedly, changing only one or two steps or the title.  We consider this SPAM.

Unfortunately, these users are saturating our database with articles that are topical duplicates - -topically the same article with only a few words changed.  This not only hurts our community but it also negatively impacts your articles.  These articles make the quality of our content unattractive to visitors and it over loads our database and robs serious members of the chance to get quality content noticed.
We would like eHow to continue to be a place where users utilize the library of informative articles and in turn help members get the article views that they want as well as earn money for their quality contributions. This is simply not possible with clone articles.

Our system will also detect and flag unsuitable articles.   These articles are usually not informative, do not contain unique content, or do not follow the submission guidelines. When an article is detected by the system as either a clone, unsuitable, or plagiarized article, the member will receive a messaging notifying them that their articles has been flagged and will be deleted.  Clone and unsuitable articles will be deleted from the database.  Members who receive the plagiarism notice will receive a chance to appeal.

Please submit the appeals form within 48 HOURS of receipt of the plagiarism notice.  If you submit your appeal within the 48 hour window your article will remain live on the site until our editorial team reviews your appeal.  If you do not appeal within the 48 hour window your article will be suspended from the site until you appeal and the editorial team reviews and renders a decision.  If you have any further questions contact us through the contact us page.

We hope that these changes will help keep eHow a rockin’ place and look forward to seeing everyone’s awesome contributions!

Thanks,
The eHow Staff