DISQUS

Comment experiment. Is there any indication that a comment has been left?

Wow, what a thrill! Superficiality carried out to the nth degree. Is this really something that women want or need? I thought there must be some inevitable limit to stupidity, but I was wrong.

Wetpaint is like many sites in making sure you can never leave. You can delete the pages of your wiki, but you can't delete the wiki. Browsing through the site tells me that the figure of 450,000 wikis is seriously inflated. Sites that depend on advertising needs big numbers, and simply not allowing deletions is one way to get them. Ditto with membership in many sites.

As one of the "old people" who tried Eons, I have to say I expected their collapse due to poor design and lack of members rather than additional funding. It will never be any competition for Myspace. It's designed strictly for people who are unfamiliar with the web and computing and need considerable handholding. The system is rigid and anything but conducive to socializing. If its apparent membership is increasing, it's probably because, like many sites, it doesn't allow you to delete your account.

Maybe you should write up a short form letter which includes the most common excuses and a one by one summary of why each is invalid. Use it as your initial contact with plagiarizers. It might be interesting to see how they respond. Maybe they'll come up some brand new, more inventive excuses.

I hope to use lulu.com for a collection of essays someday down the line. I doubt that my type of material would be plagiarized in that manner, but it's good to have the warning out. It's nice to have a way to publish without shelling out money up front, but one way to make plagiarism less tempting would be to charge a fee for each published work. It might also, incidentally, discourage some would-be authors who really have no talent or nothing to say.