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.