I would go even step further and say that 2nd option should be the only one accepted here. Since bitcointalk already has strong stance towards plagiarism and verbatim copying without proper quotation is generally seen as such, it should be enforced here as well. I don't say that people should be immediately banned over this, but it should be seen as low value posts and dealt in appropriate manner. That way people would start using quotation marks properly, and eventually amount of useless c/p posts and topics would go down.

Now question is, why people don't bother with that? It is probably due few different reasons:

• Some want to appear more knowledgeable than they really are, and when you put something in quotation marks, it is obvious that it's not your original thought.
• Ignorance. I am pretty sure that quite a few of those doing that don't even know about proper way to deal with direct copying from external source.
• Poor English level. Sentences look much better when copied directly and then just link shared instead trying to write something of your own.
• Merit farming. This tactic can be very successful as people don't really care about these things when they share the merit.
• Last but not the least, filling up signature quota. What's easier than copying something without adding personal comment?

Direct copy/paste should be clearly visible from the moment you start reading the post, as simple as that.


If it was just c/p article (or part of an article) without some personal comment about the issue, I won't merit it, simply because I don't want to encourage that kind of laziness, and by meriting low effort posts that's what we do. As @Pmalek said, it would have to be something incredibly important to me to merit such post.