And regarding
Coinshots ...the fact that (s)he was not even adding links in the first few posts makes me think it's not really shilling.
IMO, posting news articles here from a news site that you're affiliated with, work for, or own, is on the borderline of shilling at least. Personally I don't have a problem with what Coinshots is doing, because I get most of my crypto news from bitcointalk and wouldn't have stumbled across that site if he hadn't posted here. And we've seen much the same thing before--I can't remember the website, but it was the same deal with constantly posting news blurbs and links to the site.
I'm more curious about this:
We have all noticed that something has changed about how plagiarism/paraphrasing is currently treated on the forum
Maybe I'm a bit behind, but how has any of that changed? Have the rules around plagiarism relaxed? And what's the state of moderation on the forum right now? I'm wondering if Theymos needs to hire some more mods.