2. No. Spam is not a trust issue.
Of course it is not. Anyway hanging a big red trust onto an account, will be a strong punishment already (since he/she won´t be able to attend in serious Signature-campaign any longer.
Still I agree, that being flagged with neg. trust, won´t stop "intentional c&p".
But here comes the point, when is it "intentional c&p"? And in my humble opinion (intentional c&p) is what needs to be judged/banned.
How is it of any use for the forum if a member with 2000+ posts and 50+ merits over the course of 2 years or more will be punished for 2 or 1 mistakes (even if the forum-rules have to be respected) done anytime in the past?
Is any comparativeness given with 0.05% posts are to judge according to the rules?
Today
tyz got banned, he was registered since 2013 and a very constructive poster. I haven't any infomation what he copied exactly but such cases are very irritating. I think he was a Merit source, too. We don't know who's next.
Same applies to bittawm, Acura3600 and cellard or some older cases like tvplus006 and RegulusHr. The list can maybe continued, some of them are mainly active in their local board and we won't notice it here that they are a loss.
About the rest: yes, currently no plagiarism is a forum rule and that's why it's not handled by the cummunity. In my impression for example a vote could help to judge for the global mods if a forum member is useful. They can still decide if they take the poll into account or not. Final decision would be up to them.
Fully agree, tyz has been an important factor to increase my knowledge over the course of the past years with all the help & additional value he provided in local. I can´t believe he misstepped that badly that he deserved any judgement harder than an official warning. I might be wrong here, of course, just would like to see the evidence.
Bittawm's Bitcointalk Account
... is another good example how it
might be given fairness to not merge any body with every spam-bot when it comes to the sentence.
Merely forgetting to quote things is not plagiarism, and if we read it that way, you probably won't be banned at all. For it to plagiarism, you have to have the intention of passing the text off as an original work by you. In all of these recent cases (unless we make a mistake, which is rare), it's extremely obvious in context that the person is copy/pasting to make money. Usually they're copy/pasting
someone else's post and not adding anything else, in fact, which makes it very clear. Here's the most recent one:
I really like how the project is developed, we hope to get very far and that.Everything goes well and the group of developers keep us posted on everything.
I really like how the project is developed, we hope to get very far and that.Everything goes well and the group of developers keep us posted on everything
All of the recent cases are ~exactly like this, since this is what the bot looks for. (Thank you to the bot designer!)
If at any point you had a mindset where you'd treat the forum like a dumping ground by worthlessly copy/pasting other people's posts in order to make a tiny amount of money, then my default reaction is
GTFO, and you have quite an uphill battle to earn even a 2-year sigban instead. No warnings, no statute of limitations.
I know of
one case where someone was banned for plagiarism in the recent massacre, but a very careful reading of the context showed that the person actually did just forget to quote, and by "quoting" the post they were expressing an actual point even if it constituted their entire post. This person was unbanned without any sigban, since this
isn't plagiarism.
Thanks for that since it makes it easier to feel that 100% justice is involved in all decisions and there is always a chance for the banned user to get the information what he is banned for as well as the chance to explain him-/herself to rule out misunderstandings! In the aforementioned cases it seems crystal-clear.