Bitcoin Forum

User: @BTCWALK (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2823055;sa=showPosts)

It was a bit obvious to me that he wasn't the source of the long comments posted. A "normal" user doesn't have this habit of commenting, constantly posting long texts good enough for a blog post. A "normal" user has a mix of short-medium-long posts, participate in discussions, and other things.

I was pretty sure it was a pure translation, so I tried to reverse it with several languages, to no avail. Finally, I found out that he was simply rewriting texts he found online.
I don't believe he/she is using a text spinner tool (or I admit it's a good one) but rewriting manually, whatever, I still don't think it's something acceptable. Either you have your own opinion and participate in a discussion forum, or feel the need to play the parrot card in which case we don't need this.

Should it be moderated? I don't know if I'm the first one to notice him and nobody reported before, or it's considered ok "to steal the intelligence" of someone else?

An example:

original text: (https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-a-declaration-of-monetary-independence-63dee34bdff9)

I could post other examples but it's time-consuming to find the sources, you can find it not by looking at the text but the thread's title. He/she doesn't spin titles

That cheating and should be considered as guilty as plagiarism. In fact, it is plagiarism the difference is that they have used article spinner so that words can be replaced by synonyms. Those who do black hat SEO they usually do it a lot.

I think we have talked about this before and the account should be banned.

I think so. I remember people reporting users for using "text spinning" tools (or doing it manualy) to disguise their plagiarism. I believe the consensus was that this is still plagiarism (or actually worse, since they are going a step further trying to hide it).

General rule of thumb: if I know that I am willfully taking someone else's idea, I should be crediting them. This avoids the whole pedantically semantic trap of 'but what if it's general knowledge?' and all other crap.

No, it is not accepted.

[TIPS] to avoid plagiarism (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5133485.0). It is an old way to plagiarise and is classified as Text spinning/disguised plagiarism.

I think he took the time to rewrite it  :D a hard-working guy  :D
I think it should be censored, it's purposeful plagiarism. Anyone who uses the ideas and words of others to use, it's plagiarism. Although the words he uses maybe different, the content doesn't change, he just avoids plagiarism detection. LeGaulois, you have great finding!
For every issue, what I have always been concerned about is its purpose, what does he do it for?

Parapharsing is alright as long as the author of that phrase were being recognized or mention if not then it is still plagiarism taking ideas from others. In this case it is already considered as plagiarism because sentence by sentence clearly being copy intentionally.

This is a rare case and have not seen like this. Usually a post like this could not be hard to detect unless there is a keen observation being made. Well this is a good catch. This will lead others to investigate also other users that might doing this as well.

I noticed the user in question because he started thread spamming in the Speculation board recently, and yesterday he switched to the Legal and Press board (that is deleted). I didn't report any posts because I wasn't sure if it was really plagiarism or something else, but now it's more than obvious that this is just a slightly more sophisticated type of plagiarism.

The user claims that this is his analysis, but it is definitely about plagiarism, and we know that the rules in this regard are quite clear.

That's not paraphrasing, OP; that's word-substitution plagiarism.

We probably unknowingly paraphrase other people's ideas off the top of our heads when we write here, but most of us aren't looking at someone else's text when we're writing a post--and that's the difference.  That text-spinning shit is straight up plagiarism.

Yeah, assuming he didn't use a bot to do it.  And if he didn't, why not just put that same amount of effort into writing a post with your own thoughts?  I don't get it.

Better question: why would anyone spend a large amount of effort in writing a post that takes ideas from another source, only to subsequently not mention to source even though the core parts are taken word-for-word idea-for-idea?

Intellectual dishonesty is not difficult to detect. Unless you're an idiot or if you have already absorbed the knowledge fully (and thereby transformed it into your own unique idea), it's never a bad idea to say, "taking from the ideas of <author>, ...," so I don't expect anyone to sympathize in this situation.

This was indeed a plagiarism. Paraphrasing is changing the whole context, from the positioning of the parts and figures of speeches to the whole context itself, onto your own vocabulary and your own word styling, AND indicating your idea's source (This is a common issue in academic papers and researches). The text you've accused didn't paraphrased at all, but rather synonymized ^[1] other words yet remains most of the literal words used, the idea, and the parts of speech.

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[1] synonymize

I remember seeing some threads pop up in "Services" about "word spinning" services, where someone is hired to use synonyms and similar phrases to rephrase an article and post it on several places, can be different forums. This reduces the chances of being nuked due to direct plagiarism but it is still a type of copy pasting.

I have also seen people do this - convert one article from English(1)>Russian(2)>English(3) and then the end result is that article (1) and (3) are not completely same. Maybe they used more than one machine translation service as well.

Chinese Whispers game anyone? ::)

Anyway IMO it is similar to plagiarism and the user should be given same punishment that a plagiarist would get.

I think the same, he is just replacing words not using different words for the same construction, thus can't be considered paraphrasing.
Interestingly enough, I also doubt he was using an automatic tool, I've tried to spin the text with all the text spinners in the first 20 results on google for such tools, none managed to get even close, so de did put some effort into it.

Original:

No free text spinner will manage this.

In his defense, he did say in the beginning that it's now his work:
but then why did he change the wording in the text?

Unless the user comes here and explains why did he do that probably will never find out why, as it makes little sense, even with all the desperate moves for merit fishing we're all seeing every day.

This user caught my eye as I frequent the economy section and it was their style of writing (centering their texts and changing the color) that attracted me.
I replied to one of his post recently, which may have prompted him/her to switch to the press board;
The user sometimes linked the source of their post or stated that it's not their opinion, I still however considered it unethical behavior contributing very little to discussions and simply sharing (paraphrased) contents. Checking their post history first page; the user has started 13 threads and made only 7 replies (all on their thread). This indicates a lack of interest in joining forum discussions.

I mean, I wouldn't perma-ban this person, only because the person put a little effort in changing words etc.

But I suppose, considering the user is relatively new, the mods could delete his synonymized posts, ban him for a day or two, and give a one-off warning regarding such posting and giving them the benefit of the doubt. My take on this might be considered to be quite controversial, but I still want to believe the good in people so.  :-\

What do we have here? He asserts that it is his idea  :D Damn guy! Already clear to understand when not having any links or sources mentioned in his post
My opinion, he can be a guy without any knowledge in this field, or simply he doesn't want to use his brain to create things for himself. It is always easier to rewrite ideas and analysis of others in his language than to think and write for himself. Maybe his brain feels lazy to think  ::) He is hardworking compared to spammers, but a lazy when compared to content creators

He may also never be aware of this topic, and he will deny the allegations  :D

Agree, That is unacceptable and very obvious.

He just changes a few words or something we can already consider it plagiarism. Even paraphrasing should not be allowed since you just copy some sort of text in the internet and make it to something that is yours.

But in general, if you really know what you are saying you are constructing it on your mind anyway. And kind of answers could be or will be similar but copying the construction of the sentence etc. is not acceptable.

I've checked BTCWALK's entire post history and to no surprise, it is filled with text-spinned articles, from top to bottom.

Nearly half, if not more, of his total 32 posts are plagiarized, mods should nuke his ass. He is your typical cheater trying to rank one more account.

I put my money on this thing being a spinner: Chinalesis :D


archive: http://archive.vn/IXTPm#selection-565.0-565.58

I thought text spinning made you automatic toast? Am pretty sure I've seen it highlighted elsewhere and the consensus was that it's not only plagarism, it's sneaky plagarism.

It must be just as time consuming as writing your own drivel so it's never been something I've understood why people indulge in.

I would assume they don't spin by typing different words in. There are websites that can do it so it's just one extra copy-paste compared to plain plagiarism.

But yeah, amazingly they think they're smart enough to evade detection - and to be fair it's not easy to detect text spinning - but once there is a suspicion it will all unravel quickly. And suspicion could be raised by something as simple as one odd word spotted by someone who has experience with that sort of shitheadery.

As far as I know, the forum allows paraphrasing if there is citation/reference to be cited.

This is the main problem of every users who paraphrase an idea without a proper citation of the author. We may call it as an intentional plagiarism (as what tbct_mbt2 said) because there was an intention to copy the idea came from the author and modifying the some words which are synonymous to the original text.

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Why does paraphrasing happens?

Negative Side:
1. Lack of ideas.
2. In order to make your post smarter than others.
3. Post boosting

Positive Side (if there is reference cited):
1. To give a justification that will support your idea.
2. To make your post more credible and informative.

We can paraphrase/translate an idea, if we just cite the reference we have used. For me, it is good to have a wrong grammar as long as you justify it by your own words. I don`t believe that paraphrasing coincidentally happens specially if the words are purely similar to the original text. That is why we have our own finger prints, because we have our own identity and style.

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We have been discussed it on local board and thanks for Baofeng in mentioning this cite to search for a plagiarized content.

That's one thing that we should not forget. Well, that's one thing I do personally — including the original source where I got the idea. And when I was in college, our teacher in research always remind us to always give credit to the owner of the idea and do not merely copy-paste something. Read it first and then write your own understanding of the article using your own words. But even if you did that, it's always best to include the source.

Yep, it's not paraphrasing. He just changed the words by using the synonyms and even the arrangements of thoughts are still the same. I must also say that this is an act of plagiarism.

Alright. I was observing the person for several days, with another user, and seeing them continuing day by day I started to be in doubt.


That doesn't help in such cases.


When someone does that as soon as they register on a forum I doubt the intentions are good.

Lack of ideas or to become smarter than others are not reasons why people plagiarise something. They are lazy and want to get post counts for their bounties, campaigns or to build up a scam project with stolen ideas from white paper, ANN thread, website, and other documents.

Why do you think doing plagiarism can make one looks smarter? I don't catch the opinion.

To be helpful, you can translate good documents to your local language to help your locals, with sources and (if possible acceptance from authors). Do legit translations and don't plagiarise to make you look better.

Round #2
User @Agios (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2693208)

post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5257556.msg54670786#msg54670786)

original (https://cointelegraph.com/news/investment-guru-jim-rogers-the-value-of-bitcoin-will-drop-to-zero)

Also reported for copy-pasting

Next rounds coming...

I never thought that this topic would be the place for you to do those surveys  :D It will take some time to browse through all the new members of this forum, I'm still curious, how do you know its verbatim? Did you read it anywhere else? Should we warn these users and start counting violations?

User: Toracee (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2834335)

Post in question

I summarize it
Title: REASONS WHY MANY TRADERS FAIL AND LOSS MONEY
1.Overtrading
2.Ridiculous Expectations
3. Lack of Capitalization
4.Addiction to trading Forex/crypto market
5.Inability to adapt the condition of the market
6. Poor Risk Management
7. Lack of  Following a Trading Plan or not having a trading plan
8 SUMMARY

Now there is this article published here (https://admiralmarkets.com/education/articles/trading-psychology/top-reasons-why-forex-traders-fail-and-lose-money)
I summarize it
Title: Top Reasons Why Forex Traders Fail and Lose Money
- Overtrading
- Insufficient capitalisation
- Trading Addiction
- Not Adapting to the Market Conditions
- Poor Risk Management
- Not Having or Not Following a Trading Plan
- Unrealistic Expectations
- In Summary

Looking at paragraphs






(Sorry I needed to post it since it may be difficult to report such posts sometimes, and also to save the time to the person who moderates the post/user)

It appears that this account owner is not drawing conclusions about their previous bans. He already has two bans, and still does not lose hope to stay on the forum. I think we will see his "creation" more than once in the future.
Such characters very often make the same mistakes.
I applied to be banned from this account
=============================================================================================
Ban evasion.

cjie (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1077036)  Autoban user (https://bpip.org/Profile?p=cjie)
Toracee (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2834335)


(Archive (https://archive.st/vrwq))

Personally, I can't help but wonder that some people do things like this, instead of writing their own posts like most - and what's even weirder is that they do it after they've been permanently banned from the forum for the same thing. I'm just wondering if it's possible for someone to test maybe AI this way - because we've seen that this way you can generate pretty good quality posts?

Good catch again LeGaulois  ;)

This remind me for the time when the cheaters were using a tools to post a the same text full of weird synonyms and were using the homographs to they won't be detected. I thought that, this time was over but looks like it isn't.

I took the two texts in a a plagiarism checker and I got 25% match. See below.

https://i.imgur.com/zQY1SjV.png

So they are managing to fool the computer but the humans not so easy fooled.
I have to get back to searching for not so popular synonym keywords again and see what is the current situation.

Hope the mods will take away his change to post his garbage here.

That's not paraphrasing because you just changed some words in order to make it on your own. Paraphrasing on the other hand is something where a writer tries to interpret on what he understand based on the original text. That kind of word swapping doesn't need some kind of thinking needed because you just look for synonyms while the structure of the sentences are almost the same. I remembered theymos commented on what counts as paraphrasing or still counts as plagiarism but I forgot on which topic it was but I remembered text spinning still counts as plagiarism.

If you're taking someone else's intellectual property, and it so happens that they are not credited for their ideas, then you have committed intellectual theft. And if you submit your post with all that in mind, that should be plagiarism.

I've always assumed that most plagiarism that happens on bitcointalk is due to members wanting to increase their post count in the face of a language barrier, i.e., those members can't write posts in clear English which is what is required by most bounties/campaigns.

And of course they're going to keep doing it even if they're banned.  Most of them know they can get away with it, at least for a while, so they take their chances.

Definitely word-spinning and not paraphrasing.

@Harlot Paraphrasing, synonymize, plagiarism. Call it as you wish, I can still add a few in the title. In my country, it's also called Paraphrasing

Wikipedia says


Larousse says

@The Pharmacist
I added spinning too to the title  :D

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Still, I have nothing to add to the post #32 above, so:

User: Agios (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2693208)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5257016.msg54656357#msg54656357 (archive (https://web.archive.org/web/20200819161411/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5257016.msg54656357))
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ripple-brave-and-huobi-join-instant-global-payments-network-payid



Cointelegraph

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I reported the user previously and I have no idea why this person isn't banned. So here is another example and I think I will have no problem to give another example. It's just that I have others users on my list

They even managed to grab merits out of it on the below post. Looks like an serious issue and an good trick working out there.

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Post link by Agios : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5267029.0

Source: https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-classic-suffers-second-51-attack-in-a-week



Coindesk:

Question: When finding people using text spinners, how do you find the original? I have some ideas as to how to quickly check two sentences to see if they are very "similar" but I am stumped as to how to quickly find the original to check against.

I think we should not discuss here all the ways of finding plagiarism or paraphrasing texts. Just think about it, that we open all the cards to scammers. Perhaps if someone knows about these methods, he can write you a private message
Just based on the experience of finding fake photos, I know that the more we told how to find fake photos, the more difficult it was to detect scams.
Just a thought. :)

Hi

I take some keywords from their posts and extract the SERP from Google (but mainly from Google news, sometimes from Google alert) in a .txt file and check manually each result.
Sometimes using the topic title is enough  ;D it's the least time consuming thing. Sometimes they spin a whole text but forget to change the title :D

This act of plagiarism is strictly against this bitcoin forum discussion, this users is mainly here for creating a plagiarised post than commenting naturally and sharing ideas, this is shitty and should be stopped instead.
Again if s(he) had had that talent of creating and fast translating of plagiarised contents, it would have been better for him to make a natural and self post here because talents gives a hints of creating new things out of nothing. He thinks his smarter enough to hide, thanks OP for this decent investigation.

I reported the user @BTCWALK  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2823055)previously and I see him/her back again today. So, I understand they're not permanently banned but receive some days/weeks. It's a bit surprising to me but well.

Today he/she is back, but do you think the user learned a lesson from the ban? Nope. The first post is a mix of copy-paste and rewriting.
Ahh, giving a second chance... ::)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5270464.0 (archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20200821154345/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5270464.0))
https://cointelegraph.com/news/top-5-cryptocurrencies-to-watch-this-week-btc-eth-eos-xtz-atom

Doing that for a long time, he might manage to learn English, you never know !

Except a software/website is doing the spinning, I can't believe it's done manually.

There are many software's available on the internet which do the automatic sniping of texts but in most cases those texts can't be used to post because their grammer is sometimes not correct. It takes additional effort to correct the grammar and re-post it. Just a waste of time in my point of view.

If rewriting should be done en masse, there are paid services, which produce quite readable texts. But fortunately, there are the same services for detecting plagiarism, and on the detection of paraphrasing of texts. Free versions do not do deep searches, but again, if it is very important, then for such services you can pay. And plagiarism will still be discovered.