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?
It's almost never "2 or 1 mistakes" and it's almost never "mistakes". Appeals and sig bans can handle such rare cases but 99.9%+ of it is clear-cut copy-pasta BS. The fact that you see 1 or 2 messages presented as examples when the perp asks "show me what I copied" doesn't mean that's all there is.
if anything, the fact that one could cherrypick one of their posts at random and just do a simple search on a single sentence, and usually get a direct match, shows the majority of their posts are probably plagiarized.
In comparison with cellard case,
Bluestackz got banned today for plagiarism he did in June 2016, and he was registered member since June 2015.
Probably he was a full member or senior when he did plagiarism, so for his case a hard ban maybe reasonable
There is not much to add after what theymos said, but I just want to point out that while our attention is often captured by those high-profile cases - Legendary, DT members, etc - the vast majority of banned users are newbies and other low ranks, and that has always been the case.
Or to put another way - the fact that those older users managed to get away with it years ago should be viewed as an accident, not a free pass, and the sig ban option is already a huge privilege for them.
its only recently (2 years or so? my timeline is off, too much time off the forum) that plagiarism has gotten a lot of attention, and personally i think the second chance should be enough; the older users who are just now getting found out are incredibly unlikely to be repeat offenders, and the temp ban + sig ban is more than fair for these cases. C+p shitbots though, should definitely not be given a second chance; their sole purpose is to just spam seemingly good posts to farm activity and merit. take a look at this post that was actually plagiarized, yet was given a merit point:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5140199.msg50977961#msg50977961if this is the end goal, these users shouldnt be shown any leniency.