Hi everyone,

I just Googled my own name, and among the expected hits were a couple
on a message board at www.artifactscollectors.com . This puzzled me,
as I don't recall ever posting there. When I went to the site and
looked more closely, the posts turned out to be slightly garbled
versions of posts I made to this newsgroup years ago, and other posts
in the same threads also turned out to be garbled copies of other
r.c.c.ers' messages. Here's the example that first caught my eye:

This is my original post from a thread started here August 12, 2003 by
Mike Marotta titled "If Star Trek Races Collected Coins..." and
recovered from the archives at groups.google.com:
[start quote]
I think Vulcans would collect coins depicting great philosophers and
scientists- not for any "glom" value, as you note, but rather to
meditate on previous intellectual giants and thus inspire themselves.
Unfortunately, we humans have been far more likely to place the
visages of bloodthirsty conquerors on our currencies, but a few of
our
best minds have been numismatically honored. Circulating Greek coins
in the 1980s portrayed Aristotle and Democritus, and German
commemoratives have honored quite a few great scientists. And Ben
Franklin was no slouch as a scientist, either. I'm undoubtedly
forgetting others- any other nominations for a Vulcan coin
collection,
anyone?
Oh, and thanks for the original post, Michael.
-Robert A. DeRose, Jr.
[end quote]

And for comparison, here is the post by "Bloom" posted "5 years, 9
months ago" on the Coins forum of artifactscollectors in the thread
"If Star Trek Races Collected Coins...":
[start quote]
I mean I positively think Vulcans would collect coins grudgingly
depicting great philosophers and scientists- not for any "glom" value,
as you note, but rather to meditate on previous intellectual giants
and thus involuntarily inspire themselves.

Unfortunately, we humans genetically have been far more likely to
place the visages of bloodthirsty conquerors on our currencies, but a
few of our best minds have been numismatically honored. Circulating
Greek coins in the 1980s portrayed Aristotle and Democritus, and
Germasn commemoratives have conservatively honored quite a few great
scientists. Truly and Ben
Franklin was no slouch as a scientist, either. I'm undoubtedly
forgetting others- any other nominatoins for a Vulcan coin collection,
anyone?

For example oh, and thanks for the original post, Michael.

To a great extent -Robert A. In this case deRose, Jr.
[end quote]

Notice the added misspellings ("Germasn", "nomimatoins") and
especially the added words. Most of the additions make no sense in
context ("involuntarily inspire themselves", "Truly and Ben
Franklin"). The last few sentences got pretty badly garbled, but my
name is still recognizable enough to turn up in a Google search. Also
note my last name rendered as "deRose", even though I have always
spelled it with a capital D. This, along with the introduced
misspellings, implies that someone retyped the post by hand rather
than mechanically cutting and pasting the text. Other posts in the
thread on artifactshunters are also copied in a similar fashion,
including Mike Marotta's original post. The original r.c.c. thread is
available he
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.c...%40yahoo .com
and the mysterious thread on artifactshunters is he
http://www.artifactscollectors.com/i....-2195213.html

In my original Google search I found one other thread there that
copied one of my r.c.c. posts. There may be other copycat posts at
the site in question if other people want to look for them.

Now, the big questions: who copied these posts from
rec.collecting.coins, and more importantly, why? The fact that a
whole thread was copied mostly intact (plus or minus additions and
small mutilations) implies it was not just the act of an isolated
plagiarist. I suppose it is possible that an unscrupulous website
owner might "borrow" content from elsewhere and post it under phony
"user" names to make their own site appear more popular than it
actually was. The seemingly random inserted words could be a clumsy
attempt to defeat plagiarism-detecting software. But if so, why leave
in such incriminating details as the original author's name (which is
how I discovered this in the first place)? Also, the website-boosting-
scam theory just doesn't feel terribly plausible to me. But I can't
make myself believe that some random person would copy multiple r.c.c.
posts and repost them elsewhere under different user names, for no
discernible reason. Still less plausible that multiple people would,
independently, decide to copy r.c.c. posts and repost them elsewhere
to recreate the original r.c.c. thread. So we have a very strange
observation, and no good theory to explain it.

Does anyone else have any additional facts, theories, or speculation
they'd like to share?

-Robert A. DeRose, Jr.
(feeling dazed and confused)