Guttenberg is a bot that searches for plagiarism or duplicated answers on Stack Overflow. It’s currently running in SOBotics under the user Guttenberg. The code is available on GitHub.
Implementation
Every 60 seconds, Guttenberg fetches the most recent answers (the “targets”) on Stack Overflow. For each of these answers, possibly related posts (for example answers to related questions) are collected. All those posts will be checked for different characteristics (such as the Jaro-Winkler distance of the posts). If at least one of the characteristics meets the requirements, a message like this will be posted in chat:
General commands
The following commands are available. You can get this list by executing thecommands-command.(Some of the commands may be used by room owners only)
| Command | Description |
|---|---|
| alive | Returns a test reply to inform that the bot is alive |
| check | Checks a post for plagiarism: check <answer url> |
| clear | Tells the bot that everything is okay, after he warned that some executions failed |
| quota | Returns the remaining api-quota |
| say | Echoes the user input |
| status | Returns statistics about the current status |
| update | Checks if an update is available |
| reboot | Reboots Guttenberg. Usage: reboot <soft|hard> |
Special feature for mods
In one of the latest releases, Petter has implemented the checkuser-command, which is available for moderators and room-owners. It checks all posts of a given user for plagiarism. In addition to the usual check via linked/related-posts, this command uses Google to find other sources where the user might have copied code or text. (we have a limited quota of 100 requests/day)
