Yeah, this is a common occurence, but there isn't much you can do about it. Like me, I have so many "code snippets" to do things, which I have collected from various places...some I wrote, some from the usenet, some from perlmonks, and a sh*tload off of groups.google. Now, if the snippet is "unusual enough", I try to put the author's name at the the top. But alot of snippets are "generic", and even though they are written by someone, I use them as "anonymous" code examples.

What can you do? You can't even be sure that the person who claimed to write the snippet was actually the first to post it. Thing how Abigail or Merlyn must feel, seeing bastardized clones of their code all over the place, with someone else's name on it. All you can do is take satisfaction that your code has caught "public attention" and is being used....and that is what it's all about isn't it?

The alternative is to copywrite everything, and spend all your time and money trying to pull "SCO jobs" sueing everyone for using their idea. Remember...God knows what you created, and what you copied. :-)

As far as perlmonks snippets go, I have taken to saving the nodeid of useful snippets, I just refer to the perlmonks site when I want to show the code to someone else.

To me it's not about money and personal agrandizement, it's about helping to increase the human race's computing abilities, for the benefit of the whole world. ( Of course, I'm about as poor as you can get in America, but that has it's benefits too :-))