Essay Spinner Bypassing Plagiarism
Ever since there have been plagiarists, there have been people trying to catch and stop them. But while the technology used by both plagiarists and plagiarism-fighters have improved drastically over the years, the cat and mouse game between the two hasn’t changed drastically.For every new tool that the plagiarists start to use, a new tool is developed to counter it and every tool anti-plagiarists use to track content, there are countless people poking and prodding it to find weaknesses they can use against it.But while there are weaknesses in nearly every plagiarism detection tool and method, it seems a lot of would-be mastermind plagiarists are a bit behind the times. Many put their faith in alleged weaknesses that, simply put, don’t exist or have long since been closed off.Here are just five examples of sneaky ways plagiarists try to escape detection and why they don’t work. The Macro TrickThis one was common in academia for a time and relied on a quirk with modern word preocessors, in particular Microsoft Word.The idea was that you would write a non-plagiarized (often irrelevant) work in your document and then use macros to swap it out with the plagiarized one that you wanted traded.
The idea is that most plagiarism checking applications can’t read macros so they would be scanning the non-plagiarized version and the instructor, who opened the paper in his or her word processor, would see the plagiarized copy.Why it Doesn’t Work: As clever as it is, this one flat out doesn’t work.There are several problems with it. First, some plagiarism checking software will reject Word files with Macros, refusing to even scan them on security grounds, the same as many teachers disabling macros on their machine for the same reason.Second, even if it does go through, an attentive teacher is likely to notice that the paper run through the plagiarism checker is different from the one they’re grading. Finally, most grading systems used by schools involve putting the content online in a fashion where macros won’t work.In short, this sytem can only work with very dated plagiarism detection tools, grading tools and inattentive teachers. Even worse, it’s likely to draw more attention to your paper if there’s some kind of technical problem preventing it from opening.If anything, this kind of trick hurts your chances of getting away. The Letter SwapSimilar to the macro swap, the letter swap uses a slightly different trick. The idea is to take a common letter in the language, usually the lowercase “E” and swap it for a similar-looking letter in another language.To the instructor, it would look just like an “E” and be read as such but the plagiarism checker would be unable to interpret it and match it.Why it Doesn’t Work: This trick was discovered over five years ago and was actually effective, for a very limited time, against at least some plagiarism checkers.
Fiverr freelancer will provide Digital services and convert your essay to bypass Plagiarism Checker within 1 day. Aug 7, 2012 - The idea was that you would write a non-plagiarized (often irrelevant) work in. You can automate the process using spinning software, but that just produces. One of the more common tricks for circumventing plagiarism detection is. Similar to the essay mill approach, other plagiarists have realized that.
However, developers quickly closed the loophole. Now, similar letters in the same language are matched.However, even more simple plagiarism checkers are not fooled by this one as they can’t process non-standard characters and simply return an error. This strategy requires a plagiarism checker that can process the non-standard characters but hasn’t been patched to fix this trick, an unlikely combination.But even if it does work, the paper would likely generate a 0% score for copying, which, as most instructors and editors can tell you, is even more suspicious than a high one. The Careful RewriteThe idea behind this one is pretty straightforward. All plagiarism detection software is really, at a fundamental level, copy copy detection software and they wall work by matching strings of text. Therefore, theoretically, if you edit an article enough, replacing enough words, no strings will be detected and the software will not be able to match it to anything, making it appear original.Why it Doesn’t Work: There’s nothing wrong with the theory on this one, but a lot wrong with the practice.While it is true that plagiarism detection is, more or less, copy matching, it’s very advanced copy matching when it’s done well.
While it’s definitely possible to rewrite something enough to the point that an automated system can’t detect it, the amount of rewriting needed to do that is very high. In some cases, you need to edit one out of every three words to guarantee that you don’t get dinged.On a 500 word paper, that means changing at least 125 words, no easy task. You can also rewrite and rearrange, but once again you have to do a lot of work.The truth is that it’s much easier to just do an assignment legitimately than it is to try and cheat your way through it this way. You can automate the process using spinning software, but that just produces poor-quality work that needs to be rewritten by a human regardless.In short, you either waste time or fail anyway. The Essay MillOne of the more common tricks for circumventing plagiarism detection is to purchase a paper from an essay mill.
Essay Spinner Bypassing Plagiarism Video
The reason this works, at least in theory, is because whatever you get from the essay mill should be original and not in the database of any plagiarism detection software.As such, even though the plagiarist didn’t write it, the software won’t know better because it hasn’t seen the work before.Why it Doesn’t Work: First, much, if not most, of the content from essay mills are themselves plagiarized. This is out of necessity. The rates essay mills charge and the turnaround times they offer and the breadth of subjects they cover make it impossible to write completely original work for every customer.In short, there’s no honor among plagiarists.But even if the essay is plagiarism-free and gets past automated dection, instructors are likely to feel as if something is up when they detect the change in writing voice and style. Humans are still the first line when it comes to plagiarism detection and one of those is not likely to be fooled.
Article spinning is one of the most talked about and least-understood technologies when it comes to online plagiarism.For some it’s a mythical technology that makes it possible to create unlimited original content. For others, it’s a way to easily defeat plagiarism-detection technology. For others still, it’s an antiquated technology that that managed to hang around despite being completely worthless.To a degree, all of these statements are true but none of them tell the full story. To really understand article spinning, we need to explore what it is and, most importantly, the history of the technology.Only by understanding where it’s been can we understand where it’s going and why it’s still relevant over 14 years after it first became an internet phenomenon. What is Article (or Content) SpinningArticle spinning can be tough to define, so much so. However, the core idea of article spinning can be described like this.
Which started in 2004 and began to come into the spotlight in mid-to-late 2005.Created by Don Harrold, ArticleBot (in 2005) was a surprisingly basic tool. Users would copy and paste content into it and ArticleBot, using the method described above, would generate thousands of articles based upon it. It didn’t incorporate an RSS scraper (though it was rumored) nor did it interact with article directories. It was up to the user to write or obtain the content as the only scraper pulled from search results.This didn’t mean ArticleBot was an ethical tool. Though Harrold said he created it as a way to combat search engines from stifling free speech, the tool was primarily used as a black hat SEO tool, a way to generate a large volume of seemingly original content.This was especially important at the time because one of the key concerns with search engine optimization was duplicate content.
Though Google repeatedly claimed it didn’t penalize duplicate content (a claim it still makes today) it was also widely known that pages with similar content would not rank highly side-by-side in search results. Spammers were shifting away from simply repeating the same content over and over and using ArticleBot (and similar tools) to save time.However, it wasn’t long before competing products began to flood the market and ArticleBot felt the effects. The most prominent of those competitors was Webspinner. Developed by Landon Ray, the tool became so popular in the space that, in 2006, Articlebot.But the effects of the competition were profoundly felt on ArticleBot.
In mid-2005,. By late 2006 and.By mid-2010, when ArticleBot finally shut down for the final time,.But even setting aside the decline in price, ArticleBot’s six-year run was far from smooth. But was abandoned, causing the case to be closed on March 25, 2009. ArticleBot was also plagued with customer service and outage issues, resulting it in it being taken off the market and reintroduced multiple times.Fortunately for spinners though, ArticleBot was far from the only choice and other applications would help lead them into the golden age of spinning. The Golden Age of Article SpinningWhile it’s usually tough to nail down the “golden age” of anything, it’s actually fairly easy to pin down the best years of article spinning. Mid-2005 through the end of 2010 were, without a doubt, the peak years for the practice.During those years, article spinners were playing a game of numbers.
They were spamming out thousands, if not millions of pages of content in hopes that a few would gain traction with the search engines. It was victory through sheer numbers and it seemed there was little Google or other search engines could do.This was driven forward by a variety of article spinning tools. Many of those tools were not shy like ArticleBot about helping their users acquire content. They openly included RSS scrapers to grab content from blogs and then spin them into “new” articles.
Many bloggers reported seeing oddly-rewritten versions of their content, almost certainly created by such applications.However, the favorite source of content was article marketing websites. These sites had thousands of articles on a wide variety of subjects.
Though spinning and plagiarizing them was often against their terms of service, the authors were still much less likely to object.The spam technique even began to spill outside of spam blogs. And social media in general became a haven for spun content. The technique was even used by email spammers who sought ways to avoid having their emails flagged and filtered.While it’s unclear just how successful these techniques really were, any success they were having was going to be short lived as something of an apocalypse was on the horizon and it changed the internet in ways that we are still only beginning to understand.
The Panda/Farmer Explosion, Google made one of its most significant algorithm changes in all of its history., the Panda/Farmer update was a nuke dropped on article spinning.The update wasn’t aimed at spinning sites. It was aimed at a phenomenon known as “content farms” where sites would pay human to write short, low-quality articles by the dozen. Demand Media, perhaps the best known of such content farms,.Still, when one looks as the components of a content farm (low quality content, lots of ads and very low engagement) it’s easy to see just why spam sites engaged in content spinning were also impacted. This is especially true when combined with an “attribution” update less than a month before that targeted content scrapers.Panda would be updated six more times before 2011 was over (and many more times since). Google would also introduce a Penguin update on April 24, 2012 that directly targeted spam sites. Though it was much smaller, only impacting 3.1% of search results, it was an additional nail in the coffin of content spinning as an SEO tactic.In January 2011,.
By December,.As quickly as article spinning had risen, it had fallen out of favor. But that didn’t mean that the technique went away, it was just waiting for a new audience and a new purpose. A New PurposeThanks to Panda and its updates, article spinning as an SEO tactic was effectively dead. Though there are some who continue to use it, they heyday of article spinning ended when Google put its foot down.Still, if you search for article spinners on Google right now you’ll find plenty.
However, rather than being services that charge $50 or $100 per month, they’re free tools you can use right now.This free and open access has created a new target market for content spinning: StudentsThe rise of plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin have caused many students to try and find ways to fool them. Some of them have turned to article spinning as a way to quickly “rewrite” a piece and escape detection.Purveyors of article spinning technology have been all-too-happy to meed that demand.
They offer up spinning tools to students for just this purpose.Unfortunately, the results of such tools are usually very lacking., for example, a teacher mocked a student who turned in a paper on George Orwell’s 1984 that spun the phrase “Big Brother is watching you” into “Enormous Sibling is viewing you.”This new use is especially interesting given the history and previous use for article spinning. Students, desperate to avoid detection for plagiarism, are using a tool that was designed to produce a large amount of garbage content in hopes that it would fool automated algorithms. Teachers, most likely, will not be fooled even if the technology is.And that is where things will likely stay for a bit, a questionable technology producing garbage results for students who don’t wish to write their own essays. It’s a fitting end for a technology that, even at its best, had no legitimate use.
Looking to the FutureArticle spinning, as a technology, is functionally dead and has been some time. Though it may be having a resurgence among students, it’s a tool that no longer fools Google with any reliability and was never meant to fool humans.
Its usefulness as an SEO tool is done and it was never really useful for students.Sure, some will still try to use it but their success will be, at best, limited.But that doesn’t mean it’s the end for automated authorship, especially as artificial intelligence steps up and begins writing more and more compelling works.We’re already seeing the beginnings of this at the upper tiers. The Washington Post, for example,AI authorship is only going to get better, easier and cheaper, soon making it practical for spammers and students alike.Spinning may be effectively dead, but it will likely be replaced quickly by something that many will see as much scarier while others will see as much more promising. Bottom LineAt the end of the day, article spinning was (and is) a very basic technology. Taking an article and using a thesaurus to replace words is neither especially difficult nor clever. It’s an idea that’s both easy to implement and is remarkably effective, at least in terms of numbers.But, in the never-ending tech war between spammer and search engine, it was a hopeless dead end.Once Google found a way to target low-quality content, regardless of origin, there wasn’t much that the spinners could do. Though the tech may have seen a resurgence lately with students, that too is a dead end as teachers are quickly catching on to the approach.However, that doesn’t mean that the war is over.
Artificial intelligence promises to bring much higher-quality automated writing to the web and that will raise a series of new questions about what we actually want from our content.In many cases, we may decide automated content is just fine, such as with the Washington Post’s AI reporter. But where it isn’t, including the classroom, we’ll have to find new ways to combat this threat.Spinning may be a dead end but there are no laurels to rest on. Instead, there’s just another, much larger war on the horizon and fresh battles over originality to be had.( Disclosure: I am a paid blogger and consultant for Turnitin).