Some time ago, the nice people at Dooyoo conned me into becoming the Community Guide for the Computer category. Now that I am semi-retired I have some time on my hands and so, being able to support the website in a positive manner was not something that I found unwelcome. It is time consuming but if there is anything that I can do to help us maintain a standard that we all would feel acceptable then I am willing to give that time.

Mostly the role involves reading all of the new reviews posted in the Computer category. Where I find reviews, mostly from new members, that could possibly do with a bit of improvement I do my best to suggest some guidelines that might help the member to raise the standard of what they write. I also have to identify reviews and even products that are in the wrong category and ask Dooyoo to move them, though this rarely seems to happen in practice!

The biggest problem, however, is with the plagiarists, those people who for some reason think that it's oh so clever, just to find a review written elsewhere that they can simple cut and paste into a review to post on Dooyoo. Why they think they can get away with it amazes me. These reviews are mostly easy to spot, especially with the help of Google, which seems to have a phenomenal memory for reviews posted elsewhere, even after they have been deleted!

It just makes me furious. These people can hardly claim that they didn't realise that it was illegal as they now have not only to agree to Dooyoo's Terms & Conditions that declares it illegal but for each review they post they have to assert that it is all their own work as well!

And yet STILL they continue to post purloined reviews! Are these people stupid!

But, maybe there's another reason, and it could be something to do with plagiarised reviews becoming a bit harder to spot.

You may have wondered what the hell the title of this opinion was all about? Well, if you don't read Filipino, that may be the reason, and this has much to do with why stolen reviews are getting harder to identify. It is to do with the huge number of new members who obviously don't have English as their first language.

The title reads, "I've got my eyes on you!" in Filipino but, as with most automatic language translations (this one done using Google's Translate tool), it probably doesn't mean that in Filipino, although I have found that Google's translations are about the best in the business. Because the English phrase is a colloquialism, the translated phrase probably means something else again.

And that is what I am finding more and more here on Dooyoo. Have you noticed a large increase in reviews that are written in very poor English? Of course, our natural reaction to this is "Ah, well, he's doing his best!" and to then rate generously. Well, I would ask you to pause for a moment and to consider an alternative explanation.

The review may have been copied from a foreign language website and automatically translated using a tool such as Google Translate, but which has made a far worse job of it.

Recently I became very suspicious about one review that just didn't seem right. As usual, I pasted a key phrase into Google and sent it off to search. It came back with a hit on an Indonesian website where the very phrase was shown in all it's "glory", translated by Google into English. That member I reported to Dooyoo and he has since been thrown off the site and his reviews deleted.

It doesn't always work though, because Google isn't always as good at spotting matches with websites in foreign languages as it is with English. However, I have found that these reviews seem to have a "lifetime" and the same badly translated reviews pop up elsewhere as well, especially on Ciao. Google will often come up with a match on a Ciao review but when you get there to check it out, the guys at Ciao have already deleted it, presumably for the same reasons we delete them here.

Plagiarism is a plague on the Web and not by any means something which is unique to Dooyoo. Whilst I have absolutely no issue with members who post reviews that are entirely their own work on multiple websites, I have no truck with those who are so lazy and dishonest as to steal the work of others to use themselves, pretending it to be their own.

So, next time you see a badly written review, one that barely makes any sense, please consider the possibility that this may well be a review that has been translated from one written somewhere else across the World Wide Web, in another language, and translated badly into English. Rather than awarding a sympathetic VU, consider instead expressing your suspicions in the comments and even reporting the review to Dooyoo.

Most of all though, please *do not* rate it VU!