I found out about ezinearticles.com via a Dosh Dosh article on content creation for niche blogs. While ezinearticles.com’s layout is a bit 1997, and some of the articles I looked at randomly were landing pages for a product rather than anything educational in and of themselves, I could see that a lot of the articles were very good. I left it overnight and decided to sign up as an author this morning.
Here’s the error message I received:
They’re kidding, right? 
I know that there are other Andrew Boyds out there - it doesn’t challenge my sense of self, because I know that they are different people. I’m OK with that. What I am not OK with is being told that there can only be one Andrew Boyd on ezinearticles.com. Apart from the shock value, the error message is not helpful to me - they have a user experience issue. As a client, I don’t know where to go from here - do I try someone else’s name instead? No - because I want my writing identified with me and not someone else, otherwise the reputation building effort is wasted.
Do I append my middle initial at the end of my first name? Would you look at an article by AndrewP Boyd? Probably not, because if I couldn’t spell my own name then I would not be worth much as a writer!
To be fair, I’ve sent them the following message via their contact page:
Hi,
I went to join and you already have an Andrew Boyd listed as an author. Does this mean that I cannot join? If not, how do I join?
Thanking you in anticipation,
Andrew Boyd
I’ll let you know how it turns out.
Ewwww, thanks for the reminder that we have work to do.
Technically, we wouldn’t allow “AndrewP Boyd”, but we would allow:
Andrew P Boyd
Andrew P. Boyd
And you could still put “Andrew Boyd” in your RESOURCE BOX to keep your name branding in tact.
I’ll have our dev team look into expanding the error message to be more useful.