OpenDiary.com: Nobody’s Home
By Jonathan Bailey • Aug 18th, 2005 • Category: Personal Experiences, VillainsImagine, for a second if, coming home from a vacation to discover that you were robbed. You quickly call the police only to discover that no one is answering the phone. You then drive down to the station to find it deserted without even an indication where to go if you need help.
That’s exactly how I feel when dealing with opendiary.com and it’s sister sites.
Over the past two months, I have attempted to contact the administrators of this site regarding two different plagiarists. Yet, every attempt to do so has been thwarted. Every email I have sent to the company, including ones to the abuse account and several to the account associated with the domain name, has bounced back.
Despite having over a month to repair their email, nothing has been done and, worse still, calling the number given with their registration info only gave me a standard status report on the site’s servers and no information on contacting the person or people who run it.
There’s simply no way, that I’ve found, to reach a human being regarding this matter…
Of course, the implications of this go far beyond just the inability to report plagiarism. Users, or so I’m forced to assume, can’t get any help if they have problems, other forms of abuse (harassment, adult content, etc.) will go unchecked and the site, more or less, becomes a wild west environment.
After all, without some means of following up on abuse complaints, there’s no way to keep such a large site clean.
In the end, this kind of negligence is completely unethical and, quite fortunately, illegal. The DMCA requires that you provide such contact information and even domain registration requires that people be able to get in touch with you. Taking that avenue, I’ve reported the lack of valid contact info to ICANN, the body that governs domain names, and I’m hoping that this will get opendiary to update their records.
Otherwise, it’s possible that the domain could be deleted as invalid. An unwelcome outcome considering there are many legitimate users of the site, but a possible consequence of breaking the rules that govern the Internet.
In the end though, Opendiary.com is one of the worst and most negligent hosts I have ever had the displeasure of working with. Though I’m holding out hope that they’ll change their ways and become good citizens in the online world, it seems unlikely at best.
It’s not a service I’d want to use and not a service that I want to deal with again.
In the meantime though, I guess I can try snail mail. Perhaps the mailing address is at least somewhat valid.
Note: As is my policy, I attempted to contact the plagiarist directly first. However, OpenDiary thwarted that as well. There are no profiles of people who post and no way for the public to get in touch with the diary owners. In fact, their rules state “No full names, addresses, telephone numbers, or other identifying information allowed.”
[tags]Plagiarism, ICANN, DMCA[/tags]
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Jonathan Bailey is The Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today, which he founded in 2005 as a way to help Webmasters going through content theft problems get accurate information and stay up to date on the rapidly-changing field. He is also a consultant to Webmasters and companies to help them devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.
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I have been trying to access the site for two days and all I get is an error message. But this site came up on Google searching so I just have to put in my two cents.
So, there have been issues in the past with open diary going offline? How often does this happen? This worries me.
Also, on the note of plagiarism, I believe that everyone is guilty of it at some point or another, but as a library worker I can tell you, most people do not even know what plagiarism is. I know it was never emphasized in any of my classrooms. So you will also need to take into consideration that this is a problem that will consistently get better over time. You can not expect the world to change overnight, and as a library worker I can tell you that you can not count on anyone to pay attention to more than they care about. If they are not concerned with their work getting plagiarized I guarantee that they will not pay attention to anyone who does care about their work. Do not get me wrong, I do agree that plagiarizing is very bad, but I am also a firm believer that if they know better, karma will get them in the end.
hey, i don't know what the hell you're talking about but i've been a part of a the opendiary community for 6 years and i've never plagiarised ANYTHING. the website's been hacked into on multiple occasions, WORK OF MINE HAS BEEN STOLEN FROM ME THAT THEY COULD NOT RECOVER. and now this attack?! yeah, i'm sure there are some people on it that plaigarize but i'm not one of them, and there's no way anyone could ever pull off being me.
hey, i don't know what the hell you're talking about but i've been a part of a the opendiary community for 6 years and i've never plagiarised ANYTHING. the website's been hacked into on multiple occasions, WORK OF MINE HAS BEEN STOLEN FROM ME THAT THEY COULD NOT RECOVER. and now this attack?! yeah, i'm sure there are some people on it that plaigarize but i'm not one of them, and there's no way anyone could ever pull off being me.
hey, i don't know what the hell you're talking about but i've been a part of a the opendiary community for 6 years and i've never plagiarised ANYTHING. the website's been hacked into on multiple occasions, WORK OF MINE HAS BEEN STOLEN FROM ME THAT THEY COULD NOT RECOVER. and now this attack?! yeah, i'm sure there are some people on it that plaigarize but i'm not one of them, and there's no way anyone could ever pull off being me.