The other day I had the frustrating experience of hitting the duplicate filter on Squidoo. I am a Giant Squid, so that although I hit the filter, my lens was still live, but I did get a warning email. I wasn’t sure what was causing the filter to trigger, because 95% of the text on the lens were originally written for that lens. There was only a small blurb from Amazon that was copy and paste.
I have heard many stories about others getting the email, and not knowing what triggered the filter. This exercise can be very frustrating, especially after putting in the time, research, and sweat to get a lens published. Even though I wasn’t specifically affected right now by this problem, I still wanted to see what was triggering the filter, so I filed a bug report and I am waiting for an answer back from HQ.
My dashboard does not show that the lens hit the filter, so I am really interested in how I was supposed to know that it had duplicate content (according to the filter) if I had not received the email. As we all know, many emails do go astray for one reason or another. As I said, I did put in a couple of sentences from a book description on Amazon, because they were so well written, and I myself had not read the book.
In the meantime, I am waiting for an answer.
While Squidoo can be very slow in answering, or in getting to a problem, it is often difficult to imagine the site from their point of view. As a business owner, I know that my priorities do not always match my customers’ priorities, because they don’t know everything that is going on internally at my company. Nor am I going to tell them. This is something that we as lensmasters have to always keep in mind when dealing with HQ. Unless a bug is a huge problem, or really adversely affecting the entire site, they will not see it as big as a problem as you do. And on top of that, they need to meet by committee to decide many things. From my experience, while working as a team takes longer, in the long run, you often get things done in a more complete way, then if you had been working on your own.
My main point here is that in order to get things changed, we do need to work within the system, because trying to work around or behind the system will not work at all. We need to get HQ to work with us to fix things.
About lakeerieartists
It is aggravating when you can’t figure out what triggered the filter because you KNOW you didn’t copy anything. I had the email on a new lens about a month ago and it took me a while to figure out what it was. I had made a book list by a specific author…didn’t copy it but apparently that is what triggered the filter. I have since heard that it was happening to others with a book list and they have determined that those shouldn’t be considered duplicate. I agree, we must work with HQ to make this site better for all of us.