Plagiarism was neither explicitly against the rules when he bought the account nor was it a known problem. He should have known not to plagiarize himself (by all accounts he did not), but I don't think he had any reason to believe others were plagiarizing.
I dont think he had any reasonable reason to check for plagiarism when he bought it, and I dont think any of the tools that checked post quality would look into potential plagiarism.
As previously stated, if account buyers are going to be held responsible for the actions of prior owners, account sales might as well be disallowed.
It technically was, we just called it spam at the time as it was not common with non newbie accounts. Account farmers were a problem even back then, and plagiarism itself wasn't uncommon. Account farmers had hundreds of accounts and they'd share posts in megathreads and places they could get away with it. Those accounts were nuked/banned, but none of them ever appealed because they knew exactly what they were doing.
I don't know for certain, but I wouldn't be surprised if Bill's account was one that slipped through the cracks, and later got flagged by the bot.
So the spam was a problem back then, but I don't think there were any instances in which anyone who stopped spamming and started making decent posts was in any real any danger of getting banned. So if you take the premise that the OP bought the account and should have known it had a poor history, the way he could have resolved the poor history at the time would be to start making decent posts and he wouldn't be in any additional danger of a ban. Also, someone with a hundred posts (the number bill gator had when it was purchased) would generally not get permabanned as soon as discovered as it was posting garbage, it would generally receive a number of temp bans to give the opportunity to improve, so his risk at the time was he would receive a temp ban, and would need to make better posts moving forward, the later of which he did.
Plagiarism may have been common back then (IDK one way or another), but I don't think it was known to be a problem, nor known to be common.
All of this revolves around if Bill should have reasonably checked for plagiarism when he bought the account.
The implication is the OP is not Bill Gator appealing his ban, but rather someone else trying to give an excuse to tag him.
Ok - lets play what ifs again...
if it isnt Bill - so what?
if it is Bill - So what?
either he did copy pasta and most people will exclude from DT, or he didn't and he will be excluded and tagged for buying an account. I don't get what your hardon is here unless it was you who actually started this thread.
The point is that multiple people, yourself included are tagging him based on what a one post newbie is saying without any supporting evidence. Lauda is saying he is going to have at least orange trust forever regardless of the opinion of anyone else based on the uncorroborated word of a one post newbie