^ Well I certainly hope that is the case. It's what we wanted when we started the drive to hunt plagiarists. Even though admin became even more forgiving and introduced new rules for removal of plagia strikes, I'd still be happy if they really changed their posting habits.
From the membership group of 100+ with plagiarism strikes, only a dozen have been online in the past week, this should indicate quite a lot of success in deterring plagiarism. Of course 90% likely dropped the account and created a new one, but hopefully at the same time they learnt to avoid plagiarism in the process.
If they didn't then get tagged as a duplicate account that is.I agree with admin that having a means to remove these strikes is much more friendly than having them remain permanently. After all, if these users (once warned and watched) continue to plagiarize, they won't end up with any karma left to have strikes removed, or points left to have their karma removed. It gave users a second chance, but not multiple chances.
The main issue to me was that certain bounties (namely
BountySuite) were allowing users with these strikes to participate in signature campaigns here, therefore having them removed was seen as unnecessary. Fortunately it also seems like this is a thing of the past. Hope that gives you further insight
PS, think it was always quite lenient, and removal of plagiarism strikes was proposed in the same spirit by myself. Maybe it was different before though, can't remember.