Thanks for letting us know, Kristi, and thanks, EF for making sure this is a safe, fair, and comfortable community.

I agree. Without point farming or additional accounts, I've accumulated plenty of points so far and have donated to both months' families so far and still have some left for myself. It seems like an unnecessary cheat to me.

But what really disappoints me is plagarism. I mean, that is a serious infraction to me. Someone worked so hard for their review, article, descriptive review, etc. It's more than just finding the easy way out, it's robbing someone of their hard work, creativity, and originality. It's just like that other adult online store stealing EF contributors' reviews to sale products on their page. It's just so low.

And I had no idea she was doing any of that so it's very surprising to me. I sure hope she takes this as a lesson to be learned and really takes some time for self-reflection. She seemed nice enough on the forum and she owes it to herself to work to be a better person. We all make mistakes and wrong choices, but we all have to power to change and improve ourselves to live a more honest and fulfilling life. That way, any recognition or admiration we receive will be well earned and real reflections of our efforts.

Plagarism is stealing another person's work, ideas, or words and passing them off as your own without any credit given to the person you took it from. It can be from taking someone's ideas for a video, using their pictures they took of a product, or copying word-for-word someone's review. It's a grave offense, whether in school, in business, or here on EF. My alma mater would actually permanently expell people from the university for plagarism.

And that's a good question about point farming. I think once you're doing things that require secrecy from the admins, you're doing something wrong. Like creating new accounts to get around the daily maximums to rack up points or posting 10 (or however many) new discussions a day for the points that are pointless and superfluous. Or submitting a bogus review.

Plagiarism is taking someone else's work...in this case I would imagine their review writing. Not cool!

Also, my two cents, though I'm not an administrator so I can't say for sure. I think many of us are a little more active now that we have the points as an incentive. I don't think it's farming if you are genuinely contributing to the community. For example, reading reviews and voting on them accordingly isn't point farming in my personal understanding. But if you are, for example, posting a bunch of reviews of toys that you've never even used to get points, or posting a bunch of forum topics that are full of single sentence questions, that is what I understand as point farming. Another example would be adding people and then un-adding them immediately after just to get the points.

Yeah, pretty much.

The funny thing that some people don't get is that we can see things on the "back end" of the site, like the forum posts with "lol" or some such over and over again.

Yeah, my school would expel me for plagiarism. It's a VERY serious offense. This is an unfortunate situation, and I imagine difficult for all involved. What I want to know is what's going to stop her from just making another account?

Going through multiple names on one account isn't such a bad thing. Some people just don't stick with the same thing. I'm too much of a creature of habit to change mine though.

She did just change her username from Sarah Marlett to "Sera" though, so that's just one of them I know about?

Thanks for letting us know Kristi.

I noticed that too. And, as I saw, this was done after the ban.

If this individual was banned, how were they able to change their username?

Hopefully her own sense of decency has got up to her by now and she realizes breaking her own suspension/banning wouldn't make her any friends here. After all, she's out for breaking rules and breaking another one will make it impossible to see her as a changed person.

I believe she did it the day before this announcement.

She had several accounts going on at the same time - and would post to the different accounts within minutes of each other. This was also what she did the first time she got banned.

Changing one's name in their one account is fine, that's our right since we're given the option. Creating three or four different accounts and using all of them as she did ... yeah.