Plagiarism Detector Community

- Caches reworked
- Added automated cache  clearing options
- Fixed the problem with checks failed on "read only" files.

minor fixes

Support for old Windows7/8(64bit) restored.
WebView runtime will be installed automatically if not present.

Minor fixes.

Includes an important fix for one search engines not working.

Known problem: will not work on Win7/8 without necessary runtime present.

Important
- New Search Engine link extraction algorithms to ensure compatibility with latest changes
- UACE (Universal  Anti-Cheat Engine) will now detect attempts to hide Plagiarism behind using homoglyphs (like Cyrillic а in English documents) and other such cheating attempts.

Many-many minor changes.

Due to the significance on the SE link extraction update, versions below 2114 will be prompted to update.

It is important to remember, that Plagiarism Detector's reports are to be properly reviewed and assessed by a human before making any final decisions on the level of Plagiarism and/or coincidental similarities present in a document. Not everything similarity detected by a program is intentional Plagiarism!

When reviewing a report myself, I usually pay attention to the following:
1. Was the proper preset used? (https://plagiarism-detector.com/smf_bb/index.php/topic,337.0.html)
2. How much Plagiarism is reported? After some practice you will get a feeling of a usual level of detection for checked documents. In my practice a document with 0% detection looks more suspicious than a document with some 5-10% (for example). Due to the nature of any language it is unlikely to have a text that has no similarities to other texts online.
3. How it is distributed within the document: big solid chunks are more likely to be real Plagiarism than short distributed sections "6 words there, 7 words there".
4. If those detected sections are any kind of set word sequences: names of organizations, books, literature or source mentions, etc.
5. Sources reported by the program. If there are a few sources with high similarity percentage reported - I will check them using the side-by-side comparison feature. If there are no "primary" sources - sources with low overall similarity score are more likely to be coincidental detections.
6. Are References properly used?
7. Are there any problems with possible resources listed. Things to note will include, for example, a very short list of possible resources or a high number of failed resources.


The criteria each client uses may be unique and take into consideration many things, including language, knowledge domain, Institution's requirements and type of document, so we don't push any kind "one rule fits all" solution in this regard. Instead we recommend to take you time to analyze you reports, use Side-By-Side Comparison feature to determine if a reported similarity is an intentional Plagiarism or not. After some practice it will be easy to split our reports that require special attention from those you can consider "clean".

You can always contact our support service to get qualified help in reviewing your reports.

Over the years since the initial discussion some additional features have been added to the software that require more data uploaded to our server. To keep things transparent I'd list some important changes here.
The main thing remains the same: no document checked with the Internet check of Plagiarism Detector is stored in any database to run checks against in the future.

Some cases when additional information, the file itself or your report is uploaded to our servers:
1. Text cannot be extracted from a document on your side (in case all local text extractors failed). The file is uploaded to our servers for text extraction and is deleted as soon as the task is completed.
2. Report to PDF export - this feature is working server-side, so any report exported to PDF is uploaded to our servers and the resulting PDF is then downloaded from our servers. The PDF will be available on our servers for a few hours and then deleted. Only the program that uploaded the file has the link to the PDF.
3. Report-sharing - if a client decides to share a report online - it will be stored on our servers for a long time and available by the link the client shares. These reports can only be accessible via the link provided, so if you share the link - be ready for search engines to index it!
4. We store statistical information on reports, which may include options used, file names and check result percentages (but not the text!). These are only used internally to detect possible problems and otherwise improve the program.
5. We consider the option to sometimes temporarily, anonymously and securely save clients' documents or reports for internal development or testing needs only. As of the moment of writing we don't have such on option. Some features we'd like to add to the program require a lot of real-world material to implement. For example we need documents with obfuscation cheating suspected to counter it, or documents for the program to start differentiating between "various kinds of Plagiarism".

If you have any concerns regarding any of these points - feel free to contact our support service in this regard.

Thank you for your interest in our software!
1. You can add a site to the "inclusion list" to be analyzed or you can add this to the "exclusion list" to not be analyzed. The later is often used to find where a document has been copied to - you exclude the valid site you have published the document at yourself and check for other sites. Both these lists are managed from a tab at the last stage of the Step-By-Step Wizard.
Besides, with enabled URL-quotation detection all text found at a given URL added to the document - will be highlighted as Referenced.

2. PDAS stands for Plagiarism Detector Accumulator Server. It is designed to maintain your own document database to check against.
It is a separate software that Plagiarism Detector can connect to to perform these types of checks.

PDAS is not required for regular Internet checks.
PDAS is required for Database checks only.

Plagiarism Detector can connect to PDAS, if there is PDAS on the network.

You can download the PDAS Demo from our site, currently it allows to store 1000 documents and requires Windows 10 to  run.
PDAS licenses are to  be purchased separately.

Feel free to ask any additional questions.

Thank you for this post. We are working on fixing this situation that some our clients have.
What happens is that Windows "ifilters" that allow text extraction from docx documents are failing. It is most likely due to some recent Microsoft's patch - we only see Windows 10 and latest office versions users having this problem.

What makes it worse is the fact that we don't have this problem in any of our testing environments. So we heavily rely on cooperation from our clients to fix this.

If you have this problem - please contact our support via e-mail.

Please contact us via our support e-mail, providing the report that you get. We will look into it.

I'm sorry for the delayed reply.

In such cases - please contact us via our support e-mail, mentioning your license code.

I'm sorry for the delayed reply.

Thank you for your feedback.

Actually, that is rare that a version update requires the license re-initialization, but in the recent months this happened a few times indeed, as we are upgrading our registration systems. A simple version update should not require a license re-initialization, unless there is a major overhaul like the mentioned.

Planned conditions for a license re-initialization necessity are:
1. Hardware changes
2. OS re-installation.

Besides we have one unplanned condition confirmed that is a problem we are currently looking into.

We are sorry for the inconvenience.

Quote from: WayneMel on May 31, 2019, 11:38:55 AM
Is it possible to change the licenses after the purchase or are you stuck with what you picked?

It is possible to upgrade the license. The price for that is the difference between prices of licenses.
If you are interested in this option - please contact our support service via e-mail for further instructions.

Quote from: OwenG on May 28, 2019, 06:38:08 AM
I send sent a mail to support not quite long. Please how long does it take to get a response from them?

The time of answer varies - our support is not 24/7, however at this moment there are no support requests that have not been answered. Actually I don't see any requests coming from the e-mail you have used for the forum registration.
If you have sent us an e-mail and have not got any answer - please let me know.

The database index was cleared with the new version install. We are aware of the problem and it will be addressed in the next PDAS development cycle. The problem is updates often change the database structure so there is currently a need to reset it.

You need to fast-import document to the database again. You can fast-import document from the storage (just first move them elsewhere) but you will lose original names. Or you can import original documents.

Fast import is performed through PDAS control center > Document Manager > Add Document and is way faster then adding document through PDC.

We are sorry for the current inconvenience.

Quote from: rayson on September 18, 2018, 07:17:10 AM
Is the merging algorithm ready now?
Thanks

No, it remains planned for future updates, at present we are working on different more pressing tasks.