If its not automated how come there was a massive 1000 ish ban at once? each case has a different context, doubt you had the time to check it out with such a short amount of time with so many bans.
Someone in the forum used a bot to find plagiarism, then reported to mods. Mods, in turn, manually checked reports, and handled each reported case hand-by-hand.
Somone's been very busy reporting copy and pasters.
The person who is reporting them should probably just be made a mod and I've suggested so in the past. Seems silly us having to verify them and handle them all. It's quite time consuming.
So someone created a working bot to detect them?
I have no idea how he spots them but he does a good job.