Mylot.com: The Latest in Paid to Post Forums

As most online freelance writers can relate, there is a tendency to look for small and immediate opportunities that will generate some funds. The best way for online writers to practice their skill, while earning, is to hit the paid to post forums. Paid to post forums allow you to create discussions, debates, and even vent on the day-to-day hooplah surrounding your life, and the bonus comes in the form of earning a few cents per post.

Mylot.com does not require its members to write on specific topics, but rather allows the member to dig down deep into the recesses of their minds and create quality, interesting, and thought provoking discussions. Their aim is that with a quality discussions will come equally quality responses from other members. All this promoting and stipulating of quality is supposed to generate better and more quality advertisement and sponsor ads on their site, which in return will trickle down into more cents earned by the members.

The early premises of promoting quality discussions was and still is the leading reason for why this site can compete with other paid to post forums. However, with any paid to post forum there is always going to be negative attributes and problems that ensue along the way, and Mylot is not immune to those negative problems.

Early on Mylot envisioned a community that embraced everyone from all over the world, making it a tolerant and open community. Who would not want to write and create a discussion, draw in responses, maybe make a few friends along the way, and earn some money while you were at it? It was that very principle which made Mylot appealing to the majority of its members.

There problems began early, and in some ways can be aligned with the not so strict joining policy-it's open to everyone with no litmus test for ethics nor ability to write. Of course with any paid to post forum, there are writer's guidelines and policies that cover reasons for why discussions are deleted. But, the site grew too fast and there are no visible moderators. What started out as a wonderful concept began to find tiny crack in its foundation. Mylot enlists its members to moderate and police the site, and with that comes a whole new set of problems.

Vigilante type moderating groups formed, and most had good intentions, while others were just plain power hungry. Mylot does not pay members extra to moderate their site, but they do encourage us to report any member that is in violation of their guidelines, which are often vague and not thorough.

Because Mylot is a community that is open to everyone from everywhere, it brings into question members motives and reasoning for being part of the community. Even though Mylot is a community for all, it has a mandatory rule of posting only in English. With a site that tries to promote quality discussions first and foremost, it is hard to enforce that with members that do not have a native tongue of English, but it can be a great learning experience for those that care to use it as that type of opportunity.

There is no daily limit on quantity of discussions and responses a member can make, and this may be reason for why Mylot has problems with lack of quality discussions, and different scams and cheating for earnings that do indeed take place on this site.

Back to Mylot's humble beginnings, they realized they had a problem with members scamming for earnings with nonsense types discussions. For example, it was common to see discussions after discussions that looked like this: "What color is your hair," What color is the sky," "What is your favorite ice cream," and other such simple types of discussions. Mylot added new rules to eliminate that problem, and expected its members to moderate and report members that are in violation of those rules.

When that scam was stomped out, the same members decided to go into high volume copy and paste mode, meaning everything and anything they could find on some website was thrown into a created discussion. In many cases, the articles and content were plagiarized from copyrighted sites. Mylot decided to make a new rule that eliminated the member's ability to use the copy and paste feature. It would reward the member when they reached 500 discussions to their credit by giving them back the copy and paste feature, with the stipulation that it could only be used for adding links, and quoting and properly citing text that was relevant to their discussion. This, however, did not stop or prevent plagiarism and copyright infringement, which still remains Mylot's biggest and ugliest problems. Some members use a different browser to bypass the 'no copy and paste till 500' rule, while others reach 500 and think they can plagiarize and copyright infringe and that Mylot wants them to do this.

Still other members abuse Mylot by spamming the discussions they create with copy and pasted jokes or recipes, which Mylot also deems against the rules. The big problem with Mylot is it grew to fast and they do not have enough of their own staff to moderate their own site. They rely on us members to do it for free, and if we did not moderate the site it would quickly grow into a site filled with poor quality discussions that were both one or two words, or plagiarized and copyright infringed.

The success of Mylot, for the most part, can be contributed to the numerous members that are there with the best of intentions, to stir thoughts, to make friends, to practice writing, and enjoy the bonus of earning a little change. However, it is the member that is driven by the earning cents alone that are more prone to breaking the rules and posting in violation of the guidelines that are in place to make this community a happy place. Those members have made Mylot, a paid to post forum, their job and the earnings are their salary. They are the same members that create nonsense, plagiarize, and copyright infringe with little thought of ethics because it is all about how many discussions they can start and respond to in a day. These are also the members that cry the loudest when their violating discussions are deleted or their friend that scammed was banned. They are the ones that keep Mylot from truly realizing their potential as a quality site. The upside is that for every scammer there are many more members willing to report them and keep Mylot free from abuses.

All in All, Mylot is a pretty good community. If you scrutinize the friends you add to your friends list on Mylot, you will always have a steady flow of quality discussions you can respond to, without having to weed through nonsense and plagiarized discussions. You won't become rich, but you can have fun communicating and discussing topics that really give you something to ponder. Mylot is like a coffee break from the hectic routines in the day. It's not a job and it will never be a salary, but it is a nice community to meet others of like mind, while feeling enlightened by others of different mind.