He also has been able to produce the specific posts that have been reported when people are asking about their ban.
I assume hilariousandco can just view all reports, which makes it easy to find the specific post.
Bingo. I don't message anyone, but I'm also - arguably - the most active moderator, or at least the one who is active in posting publicly, so people tend to go to me rather than the admins or anyone else.
Fair enough. Sounds like a reasonable explanation.
If Vod is correct about the number of posts, that would mean taking about 5,000 days assuming one post was checked per second.
5000 days is wrong... It will take 593 days to scan the current total post count.
Total forum posts 51,269,556 / 86400 secs (24hrs) = 593.40 days
The 5,000 day figure was based on Vods
half billion post figure.
I am mostly interested in the tool - the bot - used to actually report the plagiarists.
Most likely, the bot scrapes posts on the forum, compiles them into a database along with who posted and the date/time of the post, and cross references the posts among other entries in the database. Presumably other sources of writings are also compiled into the database, such as news articles, blog posts and similar, and the scraped posts are also crossed checked against these entires.
It would be very similar to how google or any other search engine works, except the database is run on your own server.