Topic: A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by a Bitcoin Forum moderator. - page 4. (Read 1541 times)

I have to ask, if the posts aren't garbage and contain anything even moderately useful or entertaining, then what does the motivation matter?

I deleted wwzsocki's posts because I have reason to believe that he made those posts merely for the sake of qualifying for ChipMixer's signature campaign. Note the timestamp of wwzsocki's application:


As far as I'm aware, wwzsocki had never posted on any of the Mining boards throughout my time as moderator. He started posting there only after being apparently advised by DarkStar_ to do so:


He has also referred to posting on this forum as "work":



Wwzsocki doesn't appear to be working for the Bitcoin Forum as a moderator or an administrator. Therefore, I believe that it is reasonable to infer from at least these words that he sees this forum as primarily, if not exclusively, a mere opportunity for financial gain through signature and bounty campaigns. His post history, especially with regards to his various endorsements of something called GOLD, his participation in its bounty campaign, and his recent application for at least one other signature campaign, bears witness to wwzsocki's motives for posting. DarkStar_ himself noticed this, as did asche and suchmoon:




Also, posts are just that: posts. What significance do they have in your life that you feel compelled to make such an earnest effort to vindicate the worth of your posts and your self-perceived literary and intellectual prowess? Is not life more important than posts on a forum that 99.99% of the world isn't even aware of? Unless, of course, this forum serves primarily or exclusively as a mere means to financial gain for you, because any action on the part of the forum's staff that is detrimental to that goal is then taken as a threat to your material self-interests.

Therefore, to be clear, I have zero tolerance for anyone whom I have reason to believe is posting exclusively or primarily for mere financial gain through signature or bounty campaigns. This forum is intended to facilitate reasonable discussions made in good faith according to its rules. (I'm of the opinion that signature campaigns are generally detrimental to this forum's usefulness.) Additionally, the Mining boards are for facilitating serious discussions of bitcoin mining-related topics according to the rules of that section and the standards of the Serious Discussion and Ivory Tower boards. Unless wwzsocki is deemed to exhibit a genuine interest in bitcoin mining and a genuine eagerness to contribute quality discourse without regard for financial gain through signature and bounty campaigns, then he is not welcome in the Mining section.

TBH I opened this thread


It would be great if you read the OP because there are all the needed details.

I have already sent two weeks ago few PMs to mods from the mining section and only received a reply from Gmaxwell, but he hasn't removed my posts and also can't see the clear reason for deletion.

Despite that he is a mod from this section, he couldn't help much either (at least answered my PM after just one day, thanks Gmaxwell).


Removed posts are also there in the OP, together with links to threads and all other info, so if you would be so kind to check them and answer here in the thread what you found it would be also great.

Not unless you ask a mod. If you're confused just said a friendly PM to the sub board mods to see if they can shed some light on it. If you're repeatedly having posts removed that you don't believe should have been then either contact an admin/Global or create thread in Meta with an argument as to why you believe they were removed in error. You can PM as well and I can search the report queue to see if there's any handled reports but if another mod has just removed the post of his own volition then I wouldn't be able to tell. As I've said before, I think the best solution would be for theymos to implement a system where we can choose a reason from a drop down menu and/or give comment in an additional field and that would solve a lot of problems. Sometimes users might make a relevant and on topic post but if it's for instance in a thread that has been necrobumped then all new posts are liable to be removed and this has annoyed a lot of people in the past because they just see their relevant and constructive post get deleted.

So, there is no other way and I would have to open a new special thread to know why my posts were deleted?

I don't know if mod in the mining section is abusing his power or even if it was a moderator from this board who deleted my posts and that is the biggest problem.

It is clear that somebody removes posts from this section and many times is very hard or even impossible to find a reason for this, additionally, it happens frequently as other members stated in this thread. The mining board looks pretty bad in terms of discussion frequency, new posts, and threads, so such behavior is at least strange in my opinion.

If you say so. 

No.

It's absolutely the same here.
[edit] and a message is automatically sent to the user of the deleted post.[/edit]

Mods do not have the option to disable notifications that a post has been deleted.
Hilarious has already given the case where you will not receive a notification for a deleted post.

So where exactly is the deprive this user of notification box or button? The only person that is lying here is you. You're spreading misinformation about something you know nothing about. Again, you really don't know how this forum works. Stop being paranoid and stop spreading false information. Do you really think I'm going to publicly post a 'bold faced lie' when theymos or any other mod could contradict me or prove otherwise? To reiterate a fact: staff here cannot choose to deprive a user of a notification of a deleted post. Whether you can on any other version of the software or on any other fourms is irrelevant.

Did you stop to think that this message was added by theymos and that he made it so that every time you delete a post, a notification is obligatorily sent to the user? And if this is hardcoded (function deletePost() { delete(); sendDeleteNotificationPM() }) there is no way a mod can "bypass" it? And maybe the fact that you can delete a post in your SMF forum without a warning is because this is not a pre-existent feature?

No match to this kind of message on SMF: https://github.com/SimpleMachines/SMF2.1/search?q=A+reply+of+yours&unscoped_q=A+reply+of+yours

BitcoinTalk SMF code is heavily modified. It's not like theymos can't add his own features or edit pre-existent ones.

Yes.

ON another SMF forum there is a post:



As a global moderator I click delete and get this dialogue box:



I click ok, and the message is gone.

No advice to the user.

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Which is why I know the moderators are making bold face lies about what they can and can't do here.  It only takes minutes to set up an SMF forum on a website (and it's free!) - give it a go and see what you can and can't do Vs what you are told can and can't be done on an SMF based forum.

Understood, thanks for clarifying.

I am aware that this may be the source of some or all of the confusion. As moderation duties often overlap, some moderators may be less aware of these dynamics than you are, which is why I made this suggestion to make it a simple task to quickly identify this activity for all of the moderators regardless of how familiar they are with the most recent spats or the tendency of people spamming reports about a particular user.

I mostly take issue with the fact that, as you stated, some moderators will simply remove the posts not taking all the things into account you have mentioned. This defacto creates a passive state of selective enforcement, intended or not, just by virtue of the fact that the reports themselves are targeted. The people spamming reports know the mods have a lot of reports to get through, and statistically if they spam enough reports, a portion of them will get removed. This is why I suggested this, or perhaps maybe a similar system, that has some kind of built in feedback to make it clear to moderators when this kind of activity is occurring.

Sounds complex and maybe it would help, but it usually quickly becomes apparent which users have issues with each other as you'll see the same names popping up in the queue. For instance, I tend to avoid reports from certain users or against certain people and especially when they have your name in them or when they're from users who are known to have issues with you. Oftentimes the reports might be accurate or technically against the rules - off topic etc - but it's usually not you who started the subject going off topic and I'm not going to go through all the posts just to try find where things went sour. Of course, another mod may see the report and then act on it and just remove your posts and I can see why that would leave you feeling like there's biases going on. Personally, I don't find slight deviations in topics that much of a big deal as that's naturally going to happen but when entire threads are derailed and overtaken by personal beefs that's when things become a problem.

Regarding abuse of the reporting system, perhaps some kind of compromise can be reached. Some users use reports as a method of interfering with, silencing, and getting retribution upon other users. Of course this makes moderator complicity indistinguishable from them simply doing their job, and it is unreasonable to expect them to keep up with every petty dispute.

My suggestion for a potential mitigation of this problem, is to create a system that notifies the moderator if a single user is reporting a very large amount of posts for a single user. The idea being, that if a user is targeting another user by spamming reports, those reports would start being highlighted from a yellow, to orange, to red scale, making identification of users reporting large amounts of posts from a single user easily identifiable. This at the very least will allow moderators to quickly identify potential abuse of the reporting system and take that into account as part of their judgement call in taking action against a reported post.

I think this would, assuming that in fact there is no moderator complicity in these actions, help them to recognize this kind of abuse, and prevent it, as well as help assuage any accusations of complicity while still maintaining opacity regarding individual moderator actions to the general forum public. Of course I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement, so I have no way of knowing if this would be worth the time to create such a system, but if it is not exceptionally difficult I think it might be a valuable addition for all involved.

All that would do is lead to more crying and disgruntlement towards mods. We would have dozens of threads created a week like, hilariousandco has removed three of my posts? Is this a personal attack? Blah blah blah. Names don't need to be shown. If you believe a post has been removed incorrectly or they're being removed often without reason and suspect a mod is abusing his power or attacking a person then create a thread about it or contact theymos. If mods were abusing their power and repeatedly removing posts for incorrect reasons it would be instantly apparent. Not only would theymos be able to see something is up but people cry here over one post being removed so imagine what would happen if mods were genuinely targeting people.


No, they don't. Timelord is just paranoid and biased and makes assumptions time and time again and this is all fuelled by his dislike of me merely because I excluded him from my trust-list due to his wildly inaccurate trust ratings. He also doesn't really know how this forum works because he assumes it was me or cyrus that removed a post because our names are on the sub boards. The only time a person won't get a notification is if the entire thread is removed.


People aren't going to get special favours just because I'm on their campaign. If that was so and it was exposed and I'd almost certainly be removed as a moderator and that's not something I'm going to jeopardise so me having a signature is irrelevant to my moderation. You'd have a much more logical argument about us removing posts/handling reports since that's what we actually get paid to do but again, if we were abusing our power people would notice.


So if you create a thread about cars and start talking about Dr Who that's on topic?


This is incorrect. Staff do not have an option to do that. The only way you'd be missing posts without a notification is if an entire thread was trashed that you had posted in and they're usually only removed when they're a generic spam thread or something like that.

I've never heard of that before. I'd be interested if a mod could confirm or deny this.

If an entire thread is deleted or trashed, then you do not receive a notification about your replies in that thread also being deleted. If your post specifically is deleted, then as far as I am aware you will always receive a notification.

Loyce's site archives every post (unedited) that is made here: http://loyce.club/archive/posts/

I have had some similar thing, small example a thread I made myself for a game, discussing some game types or how to do something and a MOD deleted some of those post      Also thought why would this ever be deleted, couldn't be more on topic

Interesting. I can think of no scenario though where not informing the member their post had been deleted, would be sensible, or fair.

If an entire thread was nuked, that could account for the missing posts. OTOH it could be that option the mods have which you mention. 

As someone has said keeping your own records could be useful. Is there some plugin that can auto archive every post you make?

This is really strange that in section as mining moderator is "heavyhanded" and "over delete" because it is obvious from the first look that this board suffers from low user attendance, lack of new threads and interesting discussions.



I would be able to understand such behavior and even accept many mistakes in boards like Altcoin Discussion or any other with high amounts of spam, new threads and very high writing frequency, but it is enough to look at the screen above to know that the mining section is just the opposite and literally needs more posts and frequent writers.

Until today, I thought that my local section suffers from low frequency, but compared to mining we are standing really strong, have multiple active threads with many updates and active discussions, despite there are only a few frequent users there.

Now I am speculating, but it is possible that the mining section is in such a bad condition, just because too many good posts are removed for no reason, which obviously scares off every user from writing another post in this section. For me, it is enough to avoid this board and from this time I haven't posted there, despite we could have an interesting discussion with the OP in the The winter mining setup thread.

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This is something new for me, despite Legendary   from now I will try to know my exact post count number because this is true that sometimes I had problems to track the post count in signature campaigns, they just don't match from time to time and I thought it is because of posts I have deleted.

I was sure every time our work is removed we got a notification and it would be great if somebody from the staff confirms this information?

This was brought up some time ago IIRC, and I think there's an option not to notify the user.

On previous occasions, I did notice that my post count decreased by 1 or 2 but received no notifications when they happened.