Bitcoin Forum

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to my thread. Currently in meta section i have seen a lot of ban appeal thread. So many members including legendary, DT accounts are getting ban due plagiarism issues. You can find from LoyceV's thread how and why so many accounts have got banned recently.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5141807.0

Unfortunately some best contributors are also getting banned nowadays. Maybe someone actively reporting for plagiarism post or created a strong bot for reporting plagiarism I think thats the reason why people are randomly getting banne. As an example you can read this Ban Appeal  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5141782.0). Basically their plagiarism issues was a matter of their past mistakes. In my opinion at the beginning of their forum journey they have made those mistakes and maybe they didn't know about the rules at that time. For why they haven't bother to delete their posts.  

I opened this thread to let them knows who haven't got enough knowledge about plagiarism. I will friendly suggest them to review their post history and delete the post if there is any copy - paste from others. You can save your account from plagiarism related ban by following this step. Feel free to visit this thread link for getting proper tips to avoid plagiarism TIPS TO AVOID PLAGIARISM (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5133485.0)

Honestly we don't want to lose a single good quality poster or contributor of the forum for this kind of plagiarism issues. I believe its better to erase our old mistakes and also should be careful in future to avoid plagiarism strictly.  

Special Note: Don't forget that forum rules is same for everyone.

A person with new account or old account must always read forum rules if there is any changes or not. When posting we should make sure that it's entirely your work and not someone else's work you just copy without giving credits to the owner or providing the source where you get the idea. In short, always add the site of the source if you are planning to share an idea, guides or tips in here. As discussed many times plagiarism is about copying someone's work and claiming it as your own idea and get banned.

I doubt that many people will actually recall what posts they copy/pasted in order to pinpoint them and delete them.

I’m personally not keen on deleting past posts as a practice. Perhaps on a recent post one may make a mistake or provide information similar to another recent post, and decide to erase it before it gets read, but older posts are part of your history on the forum, and should remain essentially there.

Perhaps the question we should be asking is why people resort to copy/paste in the first case. With few exceptions, the answer is generally down to speeding up the signature campaign quota compliancy, or merit fishing.

Note: If the forum wanted to go hardcore on plagiarism, they could easily do it with processes that work directly against the database. For some reason, that does not take place, and it's down to thirdparty to report these cases.

I strongly believe the reporter of those recent plagiarism cases is a bot, I just read LoyceV thread and I'm seeing 300-400 banned users daily in the last two days it can't be a human maybe that's why quality contributors are getting punished for their past mistakes. Just like I did some time ago (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5137726.0), I believe if a user is putting in some effort in regards to contributing positively to the forum and you come across any of his post that can implicate him/her for plagiarism the noble thing to do is call his attention to correct it but when the user doesn't change then you can alert moderators through reporting.

OP you should include this thread; TIPS TO AVOID PLAGIARISM (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5133485.0) so new members can benefits too.

Thanks for providing the thread link mate. Thread has been updated with the link which will surely help our community users to avoid plagiarism IMO. 

Thats insane actually. Is the need for merit put people to such desperate measures as plagiarism?
Personally i saw couple people that made "guides" here, which was not even formatted copy-paste but didnt realise scale of this behaviour.

All you need to do to avoid getting banned for plagiarism is not plagiarize. This is not a complicated concept.

Most of the merit givers are merit sources and those who have merit to give are mostly great members who knows the rules. So I think they will not give merits to plagiarize post.

Just create/compose your own. If you can't do that yet, then read and learn first.

Those high-ranked accounts were recently banned for posts/comments they made years ago when they were just a newbie. It's unfortunate that they did not start right.

LOL, I thank you so much for mentioning about my topic, that is more meaningful during such hottest period of plagiarism Ban Appeals. By now, banned users should spend their time to read my topic before creating their Ban Appeals. Prevention will save more time, reduce burden of stress and other things. Be more careful whenever you use Copy & Paste buttons when your account actively login, then you will be fine.

Some of those users really deserved the ban as they copy-pasted content to get merit, to increase their post count in signature campaigns and most were aware of what they were doing. However some users did it while participating in bounty campaigns and ICOs wherein they followed rules that required them to do so and even though it is wrong, I feel such participants should be given some warning and signature bans instead of being permanently banned. In such cases the managers and project managers should be banned just like it happened earlier when the rule of many bounty campaigns was to post in the ANN thread.

Sometimes users mistakenly post email content on the forum without a source link so I don't know if that can be termed as plagiarism as in such cases citing the source is tough.

Nope. It is nearly the same as requirements from campaign managers to post:
- Proof of authentication
- Application form.
Campaign managers have not been banned with such above requirements, so I don't think that they will be banned with other template requirements (I maybe wrong, not sure).
I guess you meant this campaign, that results in the perma-ban of sarul. Suddenly got banned, (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5141659.0)

Campaign managers have been banned earlier for posting such requirements as it is considered "incentive-based posting strategy" and I am not talking about Proof of authentication kind of posts.

Yeah, I meant users like sarul as such campaigns should be banned instead of the users. Campaigns shouldn't make users copy-paste the same sentence as users may do it considering it's OK but it comes under plagiarism.

The "rules" of an ICO or bounty campaign do not trump the rules of the forum. If you plagiarize, you will be banned.

I think an exception can be made in a minority of cases where the user is obviously a good contributor to the forum, with a history of useful and constructive posts, an extensive positive trading history, huge numbers of good reports, etc., and the plagiarism wasn't made for purely selfish/financial reasons. In these cases, a temporary or signature ban is acceptable. The vast majority of cases do not fall in to this category however, and certainly not the example you have given. People plagiarizing for the sole reason of earning money through a signature or bounty campaign deserve a permanent ban.

Reasons why most people will plagiarize and get banned then ban appeal.
1.) Won't create their own content.
2.) They want a fast work.
3.) Lazy.
4.) Desperate in getting merit.
5.) Being "Greedy".
6.) They want "EASY" work.
7.) Easy Money💰.

I am also pretty sure that the plagiarize detector is a bot, not a human/user here. That was a huge number of users get banned in a short period of time they are all busted and auto-banned, I can't imagine how it works 700 users overall had busted.
Here's I can say to avoid plagiarized content just create your own unique reply or post then you are totally fine in plagiarizing content(Don't be a lazy one). It's impossible to have the coincidence plagiarized one line sentence that you had posted with the same content in another post without the intention of copy pasting.

Why not just make it simple? "Do not steal others content". I can't remember if I have copy paste any post especially from forum. Perhaps I use quote of article from forum out side with ordinal link occasionally just for references. However, it would be better option review post history in case if there is any copy paste. But wondering how we will detect which posts were plagiarized since lot of post on our profile.

That one is plagiarised post, sure, but it is so foolish (sorry for the word) to make such plagiarism due to seconds of lazy to ask for information. I have no doubt that lovesmayfamilis likely did not have any shady thoughts with that plagiarised post, maybe it mainly come from lovemayfamilis' second-lasting laziness.  :-\

Will make sure to read up on the rules more thoroughly. As far as I know, I haven't done anything that would fall under the umbrella of "plagiarism" in my relatively short time here.
That being said, I can't help but get a bit worried when a bot is involved. Logically speaking, a bot makes sense, moderating a large forum manually would take a lot of manpower and all that -- but the things are known to mess up, especially in early implementations. Hope that the bot's findings are manually reviewed before the hammer comes down.

It will repeatedly happen over time. Someone might argue that:
- I plagiarised 6 months ago, and today I get perma-ban, but I might become a constructive user of the forum next month. You can not ban me today and say that I got such perma ban because you believe that I won't be able to change and become more constructive user in
- Something like two questions, will repeatedly ask over and over.

---

Therefore, I think that what theymos wrote is clear:
All perma-ban cases will be handled hand-by-hand. At first, people who plagiarised will instantly get perma-bans immedietaly with proof of their plagiarisms.
After that, they are constructive users and actually have significant contributions and did some positive net effects for the forum before their perm-bans, they can make Ban Appeals with all proofs of their  best contributions to ask for their second chances with ban-uplifts. I think it is fair enough.

---

Only one thing should be considered with signature ban period after their perma-bans uplifted:
- How long their signature ban will last?
- Which criteria will decide the period of their signature ban?
I saw a few case with signature ban for one or two years, and not sure that there are diversifying signature-ban period or not. If there are big difference, it might result in comparisons between perma-ban-uplifted users. Fortunately, total cases that get perma-ban-uplifts are so scarce, and I have a feelings that they probably satisfy with their ban-uplifts and don't want to ask for anything more from admin. At least, they have second lives.
ChiBitCTy (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=904524) (one-year signature ban)
redsn0w (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=211419) (two-year signature ban)
Limx Dev (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=389271) (I am not sure about Limx Dev account, signature has not shown again, but there is no text on period of signature ban)

I am not sure about it as in this case the user was asked to promote the brand/project by the project itself so he did not claim it as his own content and also mentioned the project's URL which means he posted the content for the company. If he had to post a "Note" below the message that he is posting this content on behalf of the project, would it still be termed as plagiarism? This is similar to posting ANN threads that contains content copied from the website. I couldn't find the source of the message but it was provided by the project itself.

Posting content written by somebody else without providing a source is still plagiarism, regardless of whether they gave you permission to do so. You are passing someone else's words off as your own.

If they used it as a quote, or included a link to the original, then that wouldn't be plagiarism. However, if there are dozens of bounty spammers all posting the same message, then there is a good chance they could be banned for spamming, rather than banned for plagiarism.

This rules if one really need to have a healthy bitcointalk account and free from red tag and ban you have to adhere strictly to them in other to avoid getting into any of them, and the first thing any new member should do is to read the rules of this forum and build good reputation.

Having permission of author or not, leaving source link, full quote, or quote with author's name is the only way to avoid plagiarism. If someone don't have shady purposes, they don't mind to leave source link or quote.
By the way, I have only one curious question that: What happen if I the quote button to quote your post, for example, but during my time to compose my post to answer you I mis-delete the end bracket? Is this considered as plagiarism if someone else use bot to find plagiarised posts and report such posts?

This is how your reply will look like so technically it isn't plagiarism and even though it gets reported by bot don't forget the moderators taking care of reviewing each reports are all humans so they'll consider it as a honest mistake and from my quote above it already shows I'm not the owner of the qouted message which means I'm not trying to present your post as mine so reporting such cases will just be a waste of time instead corrections should be suggested to OP

(will qoute correctly after you must have viewed my reply)

The suggestion is just so timely and newbie would really need to read this to be aware.
However, we should view this a warning to prevent from being perma ban.

I am an old member of the forum and I have not effort checking my post even knowing there is a massive ban, that's because I'm confident that I'm not doing the certain violation. Most of the cases I saw was about copying post of a certain member, so the time it was made, a user was already aware he is committing a serious forum rules violation.

As a newbie, we are obliged to read the rules to diligently follow it, so no excuses.

Using another quote or research something for making a reply is a preparation component and its always accepted because no one isn't master in every section. you can obviously use this way for your knowledge development and providing quality reply's. Yeah if a user feel it necessary to review his post history than it can save him obviously.


Yeah agree with your thinking and it's a responsibility for any forum user to obey forum rules and encourage others to do same.  

It may very well be reported as plagiarism, by a user or a bot, but I would think you would be very unlikely to be banned for it. If it is quite obviously supposed to be a quote, and you have just messed up the BB code, I'm sure the moderators would realize that and not issue a ban. I'm sure I remember this exact scenario being discussed in a meta thread a while ago.

I think you are right. After receiving reports from forum members, mods will do their tasks, and at the end, admins or global mods might recheck reported cases (that already checked and confirmed by mods) before doing perma-bans.
We likely have tripple-checking procedure: Bots/ Forum members > Mods > Global Mods or Admins.

I assume it would be sufficient to write something along the lines, 'I read on facebook' or 'I saw on TV' when writing a post to avoid being reported for plagiarism.
One might see an interesting discussion on the facebook wall without commenting or liking it. So that post doesn't become part of your activity log. The next time you open facebook, it is no longer there.

Or you might remember a discussion you saw on TV without knowing the show, person etc. Now imagine that you write a post mentioning what you heard on TV or read on facebook and it turns out that a very similar rephrased or exact discussion already took place somewhere else.

If the user doing the reporting or the admin who checks the report doesn't pay enough attention he might think you stole the information from that source without providing a reference while in fact that wasn't the case.     

So my question is, would it be enough to write 'I read on facebook' or 'I saw on TV'? In theory it should because you are not claiming it as your own, you just can't provide a source link to something you don't know is there.

For your question, this is why I wrote the 1.2 solution there:
For example, I can write this one, and don't plagiarise.

It's actually a good thing if you try and show the source of the content you're using to put here. Come on, what's making you ashamed of it when it's not your content afterwards? When we speak about quality here, we talk about a person's own ability and eligibility to write something that had not been created/published elsewhere which shows that the said person has got his own genuine ideas with which he/she is contributing by telling us something interesting that we didn't know before.

I guess that none of these users that come here - read the rules at first, and then cry later. If that's the case, the banhammers will continue to do their work and ban appeals will pop up as usual.

My tips to save yourself from plagiarism:

- Don't steal anybody's content. You've got your brains, use it to make a meaningful sentence. If you don't know English, learn. If you can't even do that, you don't need to post here (or simply, no need to be here as when you can't even discuss anything on your own then why are you here? Just see and learn, find your questions).

- Use quotes and use author's name in the first quote (be it from Bitcointalk - automatically shows up once we click "quote" OR somewhere else you've taken the content from). It's better to use archive and then just paste that thing here. The best thing would be to just share the work through links and don't just copy only (and if done, just paste the exact thing here with the source link).

@theymos,
Can I ask you something?
When I gave my first tip here, I just saw something and thought to ask you about the same. Isn't it possible for you to raise immediate warnings to new users when they ask the same questions like what is Bitcoin? What is confirmation? etc. etc.

Because this boosts a lot of spam as many users who've already answered it for at least 100 times, use that thread and start talking bullshit to create one more megaspam thread.

Sure, it should be done with full source link, but in case we can not remember where it is and can not find it, but we know exactly who said it, we can use quote block with author names. However, it is the last option.

I guess you suggest something like this, and it is a great idea, honestly. Some kind of warning like:
"Warning! You ask a common question, that repeatedly asked thousands of times by Newbies in the forum. So, please cancel the post, don't publish it. Instead, you should go there: Searching (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=help;page=searching) to find available answers. You most likely find available answers for your question"

To those who are trying to educate people to property use the "quote" function: I do not believe the wave of plagiarism is the result of unintentional lack of citations.

Many of the examples of plagiarism resulting in bans I have seen compromise of posts made entirely of content from a single, other source. There is no additional commentary, content, or even a brief statement saying they agree with the content. This makes me believe the intention was to try to pass off the words of someone else as their own, for their own financial benefit.

I believe the best advice is below:


The OP should be edited to reflect this advice.

You mean as you've said:

The OP should be edited to reflect this advice.

And then, when someone copies the whole statement and adds up something without quoting it:

The OP should be edited to reflect this advice and make everyone understand the rules in a much better way.

This is also considered as plagiarism (I made it clear to those who just copy - paste such contents of other users without their permission and as well, they don't even wrote but add up bullshit with what's already said by someone before).

Even unnecessary quotes (making stairs of spam without adding anything constructive and meaningful to the discussion) can also lead you to ban, so just learn from everyone's experiences and watch out, because you're under the radar and being watched as well. So, my best advice would be to ignore any such mistakes that could lead you towards a ban (maybe a permaban when it's about plagiarism).

It is exactly confirmation on highly intentional plagiarsim. Copying and pasting without source, without quote, you can not say that it is unintentional plagiarsim. It is only truth for someone whom don't know how to use quote block, and the rule of plagiarsim in the forum. Even in such case, it is faults of posters, not the forum, and they can not deny that is plagiarism made by themselves.

Best advice includes:
- Read rules
- Learn how to use quote
- Don't intentionally steal others' ideas.
theymos emphasizes it there:
Maybe, you implied about pyramid quotes. [TIPS] to avoid pyramid quotes (for Newbies) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3749076.0)
For authors' permissions to quote their statements, or images, it is unnecessary there, but we actually should ask for permissions in real life to maintain good moral behaviours.
Publication of copyright photos without permission (plagiarism), personal data.. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5107275.msg49631520#msg49631520)

Yeah those can keep someone far from committing plagiarism. Discovering self creativity is a good thing and its blindly appreciated by all. Lets forget to copy paste others ideas and establish self as a well reputed member of this community. One thing we should keep on mind that if we steal ideas from others sooner or later it will reveal. So my humble request to our forum newbies , "Do not steal ideas from others, show your own unique ideas and creativity", We are eagerly waiting to see every single users particular performances guys.

Seems ban issue become more complicated, because still I have seen last day a well reputed user got ban. I think there multiple thread about ban issue how to avoid ban including this OP. But wondering why they are not reviewing their post history yet. Either delete or edit would be solution right now. I am not encouraging for plagiarism but if someone did mistake on past then this oppurtunity to save their account by deleting or editing post.

It's not just matter of forum post. Copy from out side forum also would be consider plagiarism and ban your account. So just use your brain and follow up your post history would save your account. And try to avoid copy paste even with source link. It's not good practice. Just try to write yourself and you can use link for as a reference link. No need to copy paste all content or use quote.

Not just limiting it to pyramid quotes (but thanks for the proper word there).
I mean, I want people to understand the exact use of quoting here.

Why should quotes be used then?
When an important discussion is being done and you want to debate on that, you can quote the author's content and start discussing, but it's better to use ~snip~ for longer responses by them. One most important thing here if you want to keep the whole quote of a person is - QUOTED FOR REFERENCE (FUTURE). This is the purpose quotes serve here. If you believe that the important "said" thing can / maybe / will be edited by author and that change may be to prove themselves innocent in case they show up guilty in future for any of the related deeds to that quoted content, then that quote will work like a charm.



I don't think there's anything bad in quoting anyone's content or images (except if the data is confidential like someone's real life profile or even publishing anything personal about an entity without their consent, and in case of images, if the image is a copyrighted one, then you'll surely get into a big problem here my dear).

I know it. Users can edit, or delete their posts, so if it is likely important post, it should be quoted for future reference. Or, there is a better option to archive page includes that post. Archive has better effects because we can archive a page and see flow of discussion through that archived page. Quote has only effects for reference of a single post, and it is hard to see flow of discussion.

Some other possible reasons for plagiarism, based on what I have read on the forum is :

• language been a barrier, especially for non English speakers(I Wonder if local language boards get nuked or banned for this)
• Bad habits brought from other forums that care less about plagiarism

This reason doesn't really apply for the recent wave of bans as the merit system was not around during this time but still valid for possible reasons for todays plagiarism.

Known members are not getting banned from nothing becayse one of the biggest reasons why known accounts are getting banned are from the plagiarized post they don't even know where it came from. One of the recent example there is from billgator in which he got banned from a post he unknowingly plagiarized and do you know the reason why he doesn't know about it? He is not the first owner of the account and he just bought it from another user who probably plagiarized his way to rank up. So as you can see some high ranking members got banned because of the plagiarism they didn't even do.

Even they did plagiarised themselves or not (because plagiarsim made before the days they bought their accounts), it is clearly that they all made mistakes. Consequently, they have to admit all their mistakes, and wait for second chances to come back from death. However, as we all understood that probability to come back from deaths is very very low, and only positive-net-effected users can have such chances. If a banned users even don't think that they don't have any kind of positive-net-effects, they should once again accept their permanent death. It's hard to accept, and might make them madly, but it's fact, and if there is available second chance, but they actually can not take it, they should not complain anything more.

---

At least from bill gator situation, we got one more thing: Bought accounts that perma-banned, but get positive net-effects can actually come back with negative trusts after their perma-bans uplifted.

 An unfortunate coincidence of  commonly used phrases  is hanging  like the  "sword of Damocles" over each forum's participant. Isn't it better to implement on forum  the   preliminary background check to ensure that none of the plagiarism cases is envisaged after user's post came to life?  

The oxford dictionary stated that there are around 171,476 words currently in use. Obviously we should narrow down the number of words used in a given sentence here due to grammatical constraints and forum context.

Providing one is slightly original in thought, and writes phrases which are not just a couple of words long, one should be ok. Reported plagiarism is manually checked before proceeding to rule on it, so context and intent are taken into account.

I don't note the post of theymos on it, so I can point it out here, but theymos answered someone else's question on the risk of being considered as plagiarism by posting well-known idioms, something like this. Theymos, actually does not consider it as plagiarism at all by pointing out the even in universities, such idioms/ phrases simply be put in " xxxx ", that's all.
In the forum context, some most popular phrases like "Coin specifications, bitcoin block reward halving, and so on" are not considered as plagiarism.

---

Personally, I don't see convincing reasons to spend time and bandwith to collect such things and use them as sources for plagiabots. Mainly because people actually know what they do when copying and pasting. When plagiarism found, it is definitely very clear and convincing proofs.

Yeah agree with you and its true that some people think that its not going to reveal if they slightly edit someone others and use that as their own. I don't understand why you need to copy others if you don't have the ability to deliver something from your own. If you care about to increase your activity or getting merits then obviously you should keep it on mind that stealing others ideas isn't a good habit and thats not going to give you good return. Isn't i better to achieve the skill of free writing by your own?

Its pretty much common that one person don't have the quality to do everything perfectly but why you are taking it as a bad thing. Learning is always a better thing. So anyone can put them far from plagiarism by building a habit of learning rather than copying others. All we should remind that sooner or later our plagiarism will be opened to everyone and that time we will be ashamed for our past work.

According to lingholic (https://www.lingholic.com/how-many-words-do-i-need-to-know-the-955-rule-in-language-learning-part-2/), a vocabulary of 3,000 words will cover 95% of "common texts" and the average adult has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words.

If you take the 3,000 words that make up 95% of "common texts" (books, news articles, blog posts), and square this figure, there are 9 million possible word combinations. This means if you write two random words, there is a 1 in 9 million chance someone else will write those same words also writing two random words. Granted, some of the rules of English grammar dictate that certain words cannot be used after other particular words. I believe there to be possibly be about 5 million posts in this forum, if I am understanding how the "msg" number works in SMF correctly.

Some words are used more frequently than others, and some words will be used more frequently when discussing a particular topic/subject. I think it is pretty unlikely that two people will write the same thing, with the 2nd person writing 10 or more words exactly as the first person wrote without ever interacting with the 1st person's post.

There are certain common phrases that are okay, but I have not seen anyone banned for using a common phrase. 

It is likely you mentioned about me, like I actually plagiarised ^^.
I read a book from a Buddism monk, in which he wrote that people often feel sad when their mistakes found, and get punishments; but they should think positively and feel happy that more of their bad things have not been found yet. (I don't know where it is in the book, because I have not read this book in English version, you can buy and read it for your interests) https://www.amazon.com/Who-Ordered-This-Truckload-Dung/dp/0861712781
It is nearly the same what usually occur when people get permanent bans due to their plagiarism. They only complained, appealed, but they forgot to say thanks to all the rest violations that have not been found yet.