Bitcoin Forum

There are always some topics created by newbie alt accounts complaining about banning of the main account. If you read the posts, you will find out the reason of almost all of them is plagiarism.
Whenever I read the replies and find the post that has been copied, I say " How smart is the reporter"
As there are many posts in the forum, I think finding copy-paste posts is really difficult.

Please any one who has experience in finding copy-paste posts tell us how did you find them?
Any idea how can we find plagiarism?
Any one knows a strategy? If yes, let others know that. It can be helpful to find all copy-paste posts.

I guess you are right or maybe it helps cut and paste hide from detection.

 The newbie most opt for bounty on getting to the forum without knowing enough, they wants to make enough post to qualify. I made few post when I started and read more forum topics yet I had a lot of tags and acquisition from high rank members for poor quality post. The time I spend reading news, chats, posts, tweets and video gave me more knowledge of the space, sometime yesterday news is stale.  Mere copy of any post and put on google could reveal the original word. If any case demands quote the author and also write your opinion in your own words.

You take a phrase from a post and stick it into Google. If it finds the same phrase posted earlier by someone else - that's plagiarism.

That's not a very scalable approach though. If you want to detect plagiarism en masse you need to optimize the search by (1) limiting the number of posts to check and/or (2) reducing the corpus to check against (not the whole internet).

Use google and limit the search to the forum, for example:
"String you want to find" site:bitcointalk.org

Or simply use a plagiarism checker:
https://smallseotools.com/de/plagiarism-checker/

Plagiarism here on the forum is not easy to find. In my own experienced I always check the patrol (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=recent;patrol) and copy all text and paste it to any free plagiarism checker like the link mention above. But I'm doing this for time to time because the forum is flooded by many post and spam so you need to copy the text on the patrol page from time to time and check it to any plagiarism checker.

List of tools that I use for checking plagiarism below:

- Paid Grammarly or Use the free version from here https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker
- Copyscape (https://copyscape.com)
- SmallSEOtools Plagiarism Checker (https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/)
- Duplicate content checker by seoreviewstools (https://www.seoreviewtools.com/duplicate-content-checker/?text-input)
- Dupli Checker (http://duplichecker.com)
- Manual search with Google - just copy partial and paste it to google.

Combination of paid Grammarly and other tools listed above are good they have different algo of finding plagiarism.

There's a lot of ways to check plagiarism as many members mention above, but there is no shortcut or direct way of knowing it.
Unless you have Psychic, but there are talented people around that remember a single line from the article they've read and remember it when they saw it from other pages or sites.

But for people who do love to copy-paste from there to here, better watch out since people here are very observant for any possibility.

There are many techniques but the most often I use is a search based on "keywords". Some people tend to use not so often used words and then it's easy to find plagiarism in the search results. Word spinners made our detecting work more difficult but we still get those from time to time.

I hope you are not asking just to fine-tune your copy-paste spamming bot to fly under the radar /jk

Put the sentence or part of the sentence you think is plagiarized in quotation marks.
"Sentence you want to check here"

Google it or use another search engine if you don't use Google.
If the sentence is plagiarized the search engine should show your the exact results.

Then you compare the dates from the post on this forum to the source/s you found. If the post on Bitcointalk was made after the one that you found by doing the above it is usually a case of copy/pasting.

I said usually because it can still be the same person who posted the original text outside of Bitointalk.

Lazy plagiarisms are the ones who copy/paste full texts, some tend to change some words making Google search or using any application ineffective results.
You can search for some keywords that let you know if the user is plagiarism or not.
Some people use scripts by taking this forum's database and comparing it to the internet. When you do, you can easily discover thousands of plagiarism.

Plagiarism is copy and paste without source.
There are some people believe that if one get acceptance from original users to use texts from another, e.g. form of bounty topics, they will still can be considered as plagiarism if they don't leave source-link of original topics. Only a few words, like "I get acceptance from A to use A's topic", is not enough.
In my opinion, I think it is too harsh, but I believe if one already get acceptance from original author, there is no trouble to spend a couple of seconds to leave source link. There are no good reasons to hide orignal links.

There is one of theymos' viewpoint on plagiarism.

It definitely isn't enough and should not be, if we make it so, anyone can just go ahead and say that they have gotten the permission of the original author to use their work and there is no way we can be sure if such person is lying or saying the truth, so it's just better to put a link to the original source if it's not your work so we will be aware it's not yours.
And this are the most annoying of them all, those who simply copy people's text and paste them as theirs, either to increase their post count and get paid or to use such texts to earn merits and rank up, this set of users are the ones who make the forum admins ruthless with plagiarists.

Why would you care to find plagiarism so actively lol? I think the most common reason why many newbies plagiarise is because they are not good with the English language contrary to the belief that they are here to spam. So, whenever they find a post with good English that also says what they wanna say, they copy paste or modify it a bit. Then after years, they gain reputation and boom, a ban comes.

I'm not complaining, but just saying that although plagiarism is a ban-able offense here, it shouldn't be on the "top" of your priority to actively look for them just for the sake of it.

It is not an acceptable reason. If one is not good in English, why not use local board and post in local board? No one have rights and power to require others making posts in English.

If you look at root of reasons behind plagiarism, most of them come from financial benefits, to hit post quota, for campaigns, bounties. If there are no campaigns, bounties, they do not plagiarise.
I doubt that one can build up reputation from plagiarised and shit posts over years. There are some users permanenly banned with plagiarisms years ago, and they also have good reputation but the fact is their reputation (before permanent ban) does not come from their shit posts. There are no shitposters having good reputation.

I think, from what I mostly see, most of the plagiarism copy the material from this forum too, and they mostly just blatantly copy-paste it, without any rephrasing or changing a single word. So one of the easiest ways is just to copy a single sentence from a post and then search it on google add site:bitcointalk.org. But still, it will take time, I don't think there is any bulk way to detect plagiarism. However, at the same time, posting junk post all the way without earning a single merrit is pointless if their motivation is just earning from post, or ranking up.

If the aim is to reduce the shitposts in a section or the whole forum, the only way is limiting post section for Newbie, so they are unable to shitpost everywhere in the forum.

I was considering posting the above text as my own, but I wanted to first make sure doing so would not constitute plagiarism, so I copied this text into:
https://www.seoreviewtools.com/duplicate-content-checker/?text-input
https://www.duplichecker.com/
https://www.grammarly.com/

All three told me there are no results. I did the same with the text of a post I found (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5099378.msg49307076#msg49307076) that is nearly 9 months old, and got the same result. I believe a very common problem with plagiarism on the forum involves others' posts being copied.

You are so careful but I don't think if one write their own words, they will never be judged as plagiarism. How do I plagiarise others if I brainstorm, type my  own words to express my own ideas. Only lazy guys who copy and paste words of others will do have to do this. Hilariously, if they copy and paste, they don't need to use those tools to check they plagiarise or not.  I don't think plagiarisers will check their posts with above tools, because as theymos said scammers are always dumb, so I want to make further interpretation as spammers are mostly dumb.

The best method is using keywords for me. Many of these plagiarists have gotten smarter and they use some online tools to paraphrase to bypass many of the plagiarism-checker tools.

Not really because it's also what they want to say, some just copy without understanding what that comment means. I've seen that happen a lot when I was active in tracking plagiarized posts in another forum. Using a translator is a better method if they really want to interact with international threads imo.

Based from my experience of reporting fake ICOs and plagiarized WhitePapers, I mainly use google and copy-paste parts of their paragraphs. If I see that parts of the highlighted texts are similar to different links provided in the search, then I consider it as plagiarism. The problem arises when someone checks the post history of a user as it would be very time consuming.

I believe that there are bots created by some users specifically functions to check plagiarized texts. I doubt that this was achieved by a single individual who took the time, effort, and patience to check millions of accounts in a short amount of time.

When you copy the part of a post from someone's post history who you think he is a copy paster into google then you can find the related post on it but this is really time consuming and the only way I know.But most people using some other tools like bots which can scrape the user's post and relate with the existing post scrape to find the plagiarism.

There are some users that can get away with plagiarism, some of these people are getting smarter but not using their smartness the right way. You may have to be on the look out of those text that replaces the letter "o" to  zero (0) or simply another font and because google bots doesn't understand it, your searches won't provide results and so you will think the user wrote the original text.

I don’t think you understood my point. If I wanted to check both of those posts for plagiarism via the text of the posts, any plagiarism detector should tell me the text was plagiarized, with the source being the page the post is posted on.

Actually, this already happened to me several times already. Impulsively copying and pasting the whole paragraph without even checking/reading the entirety could lead to poor and inaccurate results. That is why it is important that before you check the paragraphs for plagiarism, read them first and apply the necessary changes.
Usually, paragraphs that contain special characters or converted letters to numbers (i.e. like what you just mentioned) raises suspicion and doubt on the validity of the sentence. Those are one of the few signs that the paper MIGHT be plagiarized or at least edited.

Unfortunately, I do not know any such bot that can bypass or detect plagiarized work with edited sentences. Manual checking may yield positive results but it may be too time consuming.

It wouldn't be a problem if you find a post that you like or that completely agrees with what you wanted to say and you copy it fully or a part of it. The problem is not giving credit to the original author of the post by posting the link where you got it from and explaining that you feel the same way as the person who wrote the post.

Writing in perfect English is also not a requirement to participate in discussions here. You can see a clear difference between a genuine post of a user wanting to be a member of the forum and someone who just wrote a bunch of nonsense for whatever reason.
 

Users don't notice that forum has quote button, which has its very powerful meanings:
- Saving time because users don't have to do copying and pasting with Crl+C and Ctr+V (in case they want to mention about ideas of others that posted in the forum).
- Preventing risks of forgetting credits/ sources of original places from which helpful contents taken for their posts.

By the way, rephrasing other posts is risky, because if posters don't leave original sources, their posts will be considered as a well-known type of plagiarism ⁽¹⁾. There are bots to do this, and sometimes it is difficult and takes times to investigate rephrased posts are made by human or bot. In my opinion, I don't think posters have good reasons to rephrase posts of others. They mainly do it to get post count.

⁽¹⁾ Text spinning/disguised plagiarism (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4721932.0)

The main point is to make it public to anyone reading the post that you are not the original author in anyway you want. If someone doesn't know the proper way to use the quote button or quote the post it still isn't a big problem. You can make it known that the post isn't yours in other ways.
For example, begin your post by saying
Every reported plagiarism post is checked by the forum mods, humans. By checking the report they would realize that a user didn't copy/paste since he is mentioning the original author and isn't claiming it as his own. The user would than receive advice by the mods and other members how to quote posts properly but he wouldn't be banned.

The topic made for plagiarism detection technique, but I think it is worthy to remind all users on how to avoid plagiarism.
[TIPS] to avoid plagiarism (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5133485.0)
In my topic, I suggested some solutions to avoid plagiarsim (more details presented in my topic):

1. Copying and pasting contents from other sources (outside the forum, such as articles, websites, etc.) without source links
1.1. Leaving the source link behind the content (definition of plagiarism, in this example)
1.2. Using quote block without exactly original source
1.3. Using quote block with source (author names, website links, etc.)

2. Copying and pasting contents inside posts/ topics of other forum members without quotes or source links
2.1. Leaving the link of my topic below contents that you copied from my OP
2.2. Using quote block without author names, or links (because you forgot where they are).
2.3. Using quote block with full link

This method of @Pmalek is good, too.

I prefer to use link to avoid plagiarism for external source. For internal source such as from comment on this forum i will tag user profile link or post link to make hyperlink to profile name. As Pmalek and tbtc_mt2 says. For making new thread on my local board i will always ask to thread creator first to get permission.

How to know or detect plagiarism, all of suggestion on first pages is a good stuff. You can also trying few website to make sure that contents is from plagiarized.

I think your reasons cannot be forced, why you forbid people to do what I think is good, to reduce plagiarism.
and how they can get a reputation for posting plagiarism.
Lastly you say it doesn't have to be her/his top priority, in my opinion it doesn't matter as long as she/he does it right,and make the forum better.