There's quite a lot of crossover between this topic and my topic here:
List of advertising shills. Mods please review and ban as appropriate.I didn't get a firm answer from any mods on that thread, unfortunately, but after pushing repeatedly I did finally manage to get some of the worst offenders such as JessicaVL and her alt accounts banned. There are plenty of new accounts doing the exact same thing I have reported many times who are still being allowed to spam, however.
If you meant people(mostly newbies) who are copy-pasting random articles and adding the source link at the bottom, as far as I know it's legal(which is kinda reasonable).
I disagree. As far as I am concerned, it is legalized plagiarism, and these users should be banned. Look at some of theymos' previous posts regarding plagiarism:
In essentially all cases, plagiarism deserves a permaban because it usually proves definitively that the person is here for the wrong reasons: to fill up space in order to get paid, not to actually discuss or contribute.
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 don't think it matters whether you copy and paste somebody else's post and add nothing of your own, or whether you copy and paste somebody else's post and add nothing of your own, but include a link at the bottom. The mindset behind these two things is exactly the same - put in the bare minimum amount of effort in order to earn some worthless tokens/fish for merits/hit a post quota/whatever. Including a link or not doesn't change the fact the user is "here for the wrong reasons" and using the forum as a "dumping ground".
This kind of legalized plagiarism adds nothing of value to the forum and these users deserve to be banned.