TurnitinBot - good or bad?

They have: 12 posts

Joined: Sep 2002

Is anybody familiar with the TurnitinBot/1.5 http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html user agent? It is making a lot of visits to one of my sites and I am not familiar with it. I have an .htaccess file with a list of bad guys to keep out and would like to add this if anybody knows it is evil.

Thanks.

Abhishek Reddy's picture

He has: 3,348 posts

Joined: Jul 2001

Turnitin is a service that keeps "a copy of the web" in a database that teachers can use to compare students' assignments against, to detect plagiarism (if I remember right - was on the news recently).

I don't think it's anything harmful... Wink

He has: 1,380 posts

Joined: Feb 2002

my school uses it to process certain papers...for english class, etc. works real well i hear

nike_guy_man's picture

They have: 840 posts

Joined: Sep 2000

The concept of it seems outrageous to me
If you happen to write 1 sentence the same as someone else did, it picks it up and turns it in
If you steal a paper that isn't indexed by them (they have somewhere around 1 million sites, which is nothing) then you can get away with it

Doesn't seem to make sense
But, any info you have on your site won't be plagiarized now by high school and college students!

Laughing out loud

hagar's picture

They have: 104 posts

Joined: Oct 2002

sounds like another one of those software tools for people who wouldnt know a computer if an AS400 landed on their volkswagen from orbit.

"That will be $99 please. Thankyou, enjoy your useless software! Come again!"

"I ’ll make thee glorious by my pen, And famous by my sword." - James Graham, Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650)

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

what's a volkswagon ? Laughing out loud

If it's sucking up bandwidth block it, if not don't worry about it

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