Topic: Moderation (Read 461 times)

My ANN appears to be shadowbanned - it isn't in the forum list of topics, and can only be viewed by following a link.  If someone posts in the topic, you can immediately go to the Announcements forum and it won't be found anywhere:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/ann-commod-golden-crypto-commodity-the-2-cryptocurrency-5194266


But even when people follow a link that I share somewhere else, and they want to talk to me about my coin in the topic I started, a moderator deletes my posts:

http://goldencryptocommod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/On-Topic.png


But I am glad that Bitcointalk is available for us to use, even in a limited capacity.

From my understanding, the forum guidelines make no distinction at all between "advertising" and "notifying users", which is why Barr_Official was banned without warning for a total of 2 posts in 2 topics.

But all that aside, thank you for all your time and hopefully we'll be more aware of these issues and avoid any further problems.

Without specifically seeing exactly what you're talking about I can't really give you an in depth answer. However, if your account was banned, and you feel that was unjustified then you can send a ban appeal to the email included in the banned message. The admins would have then looked at it, and investigated. If they thought that the ban was unfair they would then unban you.

If you were permanently banned for specifically plagiarism then that's a permanent ban, and without successfully appealing it you wouldn't be able to post the announcement thread without it being considered ban evading.  

Posting advertisements within someone else's thread no matter if its wanted by the OP or not is still against forum guidelines. I just gave the example of OP's sometimes reporting these kinds of messages.

In terms of how you should go about notifying users that you have taken over the project? Like I said I don't know the specifics of this case that you are referring too, but as long as you notifying the users doesn't break forum guidelines then you are free to do so. 

And by the way, while I'm here, I should mention that my Pre-ANN topic was deleted without explanation or even a message.  I went to check the topic to see the replies, it wasn't there, so I actually thought I must have failed to click "post".

But then I found the link: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5190034.new#new

So the issue of the moderation here has already put my blockchain launch behind schedule, which is why I have a personal interest in this topic.

As I said, Fractalcoin users wouldn't have known to go the Barr website until we posted in each Fractalcoin ANN at least once.  After we did that, the majority of the Fractalcoin community was able to move to our ANN and move to our blockchain.  We were welcome in their ANN, we actually fulfilled the original purpose of the ANN when no one else would, so it helps no one for mods to delete those posts.

Which scenario ends up taking more posts and more server resources: announcing a new ANN once in the old ANN, or 5 more years of people showing up to the old ANN and asking "Has anything happened with this coin" because they didn't see the new ANN?

Same for Keycoin, XAI, and a list of others who chose to move to our blockchain.  ACP Anarchists Prime only had ~2 million coins, and users burned over 1 million of them and moved them to Barr.  We did it mostly in our own ANN, but that required posting in their ANN first.

If that's spam, how else do you suggest a community coin takeover should be carried out?  Updating a missing dev's OP?  We can't update someone else's OP without their login.  If we could takeover the original dev's accounts, we wouldn't need to move the coin to a new blockchain.  But moving coins to new blockchains is an important thing that happens a lot here, and it always requires informing the people who participated in the original ANN.

I'm about to start an ANN.  I want Barr_Official and Runpaint to participate.  I want them to post some of the same things in my ANN that they post in their own topics.  But since you ban people for posting where they're wanted, without any report from the OP, it makes it harder to get things done here.

 AFAIK, every plagiarism report we get is reviewed by a member of staff. However, users are automating reports these days, and that's likely will the confusion comes from. There will always be a human (staff) verifying whether a report is correct or not. There is no automatic banning on the forum when it comes to plagiarism or anything for that matter.

The above user already came to the conclusion that advertisement spam was what got them banned, and considering it was temporary then I would agree that was likely the case. Sometimes staff members will message a user if they are repeatedly breaking the rules instead of banning them. This depends on the staff member who is handling the report, though.

Sure, if we want to nitpick. Although, generally bans are highly accurate, moderators are human after all, there will always be mistakes, although a staff member wouldn't knowingly ban someone who didn't deserve it. Only a few bans  get appealed successfully. These are usually when a piece of information wasn't apparent first of all, and after the user explaining their situation it justified a unban. This doesn't necessarily mean the staff member who issued the ban made a mistake.

Here's a recent case of a user being unbanned: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.52655319

Banned accounts can contact the admins via the appeal email that is left when a user is banned.


Link to it on their website? I'm assuming that would be the best place for them to update their users, because important information like that can easily get buried on a forum post. Also, updating their OP with important information like that might be a good shout.

Hey Welsh

Is there a bot that reports copy-and-paste posts, and then do those posts get banned en masse with little to no human review?  For example, if someone uses the same quote in 2 threads, or the same paragraph of an on-topic important update about a coin, then that person could get banned.  Right?  I just saw another thread about that.

If the forum auto-bans anyone who copies and pastes even a small portion of a post, without a human moderator looking to see whether it's an advertisement for a mining pool or not, just say so.  

That way, if you said that the forum doesn't allow any 2 posts to contain any matching string of words, then your insult about "stop doing the behavior that got you banned" would mean something.  Because then people would actually be able to know what gets them banned, so that they could avoid it.

But you didn't say that.  You said no moderator would ban someone unless that person deserved it.  That contradicts your later assertion that staff can make mistakes.  You've repeatedly implied that the mods here cannot make mistakes, and that therefore there is no need for a ban appeal process because all bans are deserved.

In fact a banned account is unable to contact moderators, because the account isn't allowed to send messages or even reports.  The only apparent option for a mistakenly banned account is to use another account to create a topic here in Meta.

Sometimes a community takeover dev moves a coin to a new blockchain, becoming the coin's new dev, but doesn't have the alert keys for the old wallet or the password to the ANN OP account  (because the original devs were scammers and can't be contacted).  Sometimes the new dev has a non-advertisement, on-topic update, and a message necessary to announce to thousands of holders of a coin.  Sometimes it's the logical procedure to post the same information in 2 different topics, since an altcoin can have more than one active topic over the course of several years, and these topics are the primary way to reach the coin-holding community.

That's what I did when I was the dev for Keycoin, Fractalcoin, and Sapience AIFX, and BARR.  At the same time I was an auxiliary dev for Lyrabar and Unitus.  There were many times that I needed to post a copied-and-pasted section of information into 2 different threads.  Sometimes more than 2, but no mod ever had a problem with it.

When I was hosting Keycoin.us, Fractalcoin.us, Lyrabar.us, and Unitus.ninja, paying by myself to host .conf files and huge blockchain bootstraps for 5 coins, I provided the only way users could sync wallets.  These coins were listed and actively traded at Poloniex, Bittrex, and other exchanges, but the exchanges could only process withdrawals with my help because I was the only dev at the time.  My job as dev sometimes included posting the same thing in 2 different topics, and I was never banned or even warned.

Side note - one time Cryptsy's withdrawal system accidentally got stuck and continued to duplicate my withdrawals of Keycoin until they had sent me their entire holdings.  I sent it back, but I always suspected that the same glitch could've been the real reason they lost all their BTC and had to shut down.  That's one reason why BARR always required manual approval for our system, because any automated system can make mistakes that a human would never make.  For example, flagging a post as mining pool spam when it has nothing to do with mining pools or spam.

So anyway, there was a time when I was providing the only available wallet downloads for 4 different actively-traded coins.  Each of those coins had multiple different active topics here at Bitcointalk.  For 2 years I maintained the only Keycoin node that could accept new connections; until we moved to the new blockchain, there was no way to update a DNS seeder or fix the code.  When I took over as the new Fractalcoin dev, the blockchain hadn't moved in a month.  Fractalcoin was still traded at Poloniex, Cryptsy, and Bittrex, but the coin didn't work.  I made it work.  Doing so required me to send the same message more than once in different places, and it never caused problems.  It actually solved problems, for people all over the world.  

One time I was renting rigs from someone in Sweden through MiningRigRentals, and I mentioned to him what I was doing.  He said that I had just fixed his stuck Fractalcoin transaction that he had sent weeks previously and had given up on.  What are the odds?  Actually it's not as unlikely, since he had X11 rigs.  But the point is that when I randomly contacted a person in Sweden for help with something, I had already helped him with something else without knowing it.  I told that story at the time, in more than one topic, and nobody called it spam.

Back then, I sometimes had to announce critical information to the communities of all 5 of the coins I was the dev of.  Since we moved the majority of active users for those 5 coins, and others, into 1 new coin, our announcements were automatically on-topic in the many different ANNs for each of those coins.  In fact if we had NOT made announcements in the original ANNs for each coin, we would've been called scammers for moving entire networks to a new blockchain without making every effort to inform all interested parties.

Our burn addresses are #1 on the richlists for 10 different coins, proving on-blockchain that the largest portion of coins from each of those networks has been moved to ours.  That necessarily means that the majority of active users of those coins need us to post at least once in each of their topics.

Since our project is unique, and has been active across multiple Bitcointalk topics, a bot might see our posting activity as spam.  But a human shouldn't.

You're perfectly within your right to question any staff member. Staff are normal users too, and mistakes can definitely happen. This is the reason why there's a ban appeal process, and there have been multiple times that a ban has been lifted because of a mistake. Looking at it from the point of view that staff have "power" is the wrong way to look about it in my opinion. We just moderate based on the forum guidelines, and we aren't looking to assert our 'dominance' or show how powerful you're. You could open a thread, and call me all the names under the sun, and I wouldn't moderate it in the slightest as long as it was posted in the appropriate section.

Your ban was only temporary, and I would just advise you to take that as a warning, and not continue the behaviour which got you banned in the first place, and you should be alright!  Reading the forum guidelines from time to time is a great time sink in my opinion

Yeah I looked it over again, and I did say positive things about my coin.  In the course of explaining why Bitconnect users could possibly move their coins to a different blockchain, I advertised reasons why they could benefit from doing that with their Bitconnect.  I didn't think it was advertising at the time, but I can see now that it could be defined that way even though I didn't offer to sell anything or accept any money or cryptocurrency for any exchange or service.  

I don't have a mining pool of any kind, and I don't know why you think I do, but maybe the other moderator also mistakenly thought that I was advertising a mining pool.  I apologize for not making myself more clear.  And like you said, you can't see the screenshots of the deleted posts because of the Bitcointalk image proxy problem.  I apologize for not having another way to share image links here, and I admit that the problem was exacerbated by my own personal failure to find another way to share images.

I also apologize if my single post in a thread appeared to be multiple posts when a moderator looked at it.  If I used unorthodox spacing or paragraphs that made 1 post look like repeated spam, then that's my fault.  And I apologize for engaging with a Bitconnect user in the Bitconnect topic, who said "I think it's great" in response to my post about Bitconnect.  I should not have led that person into his own spam violations, and hopefully he does not continue to misuse Bitcointalk as I wrongfully did for the purpose of discussing possibilities for an altcoin in that altcoins's topic.

I realize that everyone else is promoting their own altcoins, and every topic can't be a spamfest for every altcoin.  I should've stayed in my own topics, because like you said the OP doesn't want spam in his topic.  Of course I also just had a post deleted here in my own topic, but that just means I'm automatically guilty like you said.  

I haven't been here for a couple of years, and I thought I'd jump right back in like it used to be.  I should've taken the time to ease back in and be a humble newbie for a while, until I learned the new rules.  People used to be happy when I came to their thread and spent $5,000 on their coin that only had $24 a day volume, but I should have asked around and found out that it's no longer acceptable to talk about doing those things with a coin, in that coin's topic.  Now I know, lesson learned.

I overreacted out of frustration, and I should've just let it go.  I couldn't understand why my posts were deleted and I was banned, when apparently the entire thread was also deleted.  But I can see that it's sometimes important to punish people and specifically delete their posts and ban them, even when the rest of the topic is deleted anyway.  If a moderator spends that extra time deleting one user's posts before he deletes the rest of the posts too, then the user should take the hint.  

I might be a little bit Asperger's, so sometimes I don't get it at first.  I'm sorry.  I get it now.  I'm nobody, my posts are worth nothing to anyone.  My entire existence here can be erased with the press of a button, and nobody will care or even notice.  That's the reality of it.  Since that is my place, and your place is to have the power to decide what I'm allowed to say, it was inappropriate for me to question your ruling even if you still don't know what was deleted or why.  If you say the banning was justified, then it was justified.  

Like I said I'm not the one that dealt with the reports against you, however I'm assuming you were banned for the advertisement of your pools in other users threads, and not because you are posting about a scam project, but without seeing the deleted messages myself this is based on speculation of what has been said in this thread. It may have been deleted for other reasons such as multiple posts in a row (not combing your posts into one) or something else unrelated. If it was a on topic post it would not have been deleted unless it broke another rule. Your ban however it likely to due to the fact that you were advertising mining pools in other users thread (probably in multiple users threads, and not just a one off).

Hey Welsh

The particular thread owner of Bitconnect, who may or may not appreciate my posts, is not around anymore. 
I can't privately message him, because he disappeared with millions of dollars of Bitcointalk users' money.

That is the exact topic of discussion which I addressed in my post, which was deleted.

You said that, but now you're using my posts from this thread, which I created, as examples of why my other posts were deleted.

So nothing you say means anything.

1. We ban on according to forum policy. Plus, considering it was a temp ban you were banned by either a admin or global moderator which are far more experienced than myself.

2. There is a option for self moderation, however I wouldn't describe that as the OP not wanting users to have freedom.

3. He doesn't have any authority, and I'm not saying that the particular thread you posted in reported your post. I'm stating that this advertisement spam in other users threads is not only disallowed by the forum guidelines, but also is not appreciated by many of the altcoin announcement thread owners.

Make up your mind then. I'm just going by what you posted yourself, if you're lying then I can't do much about that.

Are you actually saying that you would ban people on the word of the original Bitconnect devs?  Please confirm.

Isn't there a feature called "self-moderated thread" if the OP doesn't want people to have any freedom in their topic?

If the OP didn't choose self-moderation, why would he have any more authority than me over what people are allowed to say in the topic?

No.

If you'd like to send a personal message to the OP then you can do, maybe if they deem it appropriate they may add it to their website that you can mine their coin at x mining pool, and include a link to their website pool page on their thread. Other than that its not allowed, and a lot of the owners of these announcements actually report these sorts of posts.

This question has already been answered directly on the unofficial guidelines thread by mprep:


This is a more up to date version than the 2014 post that you are referring too.

Please quote the "clear advertising" from my post.  Bonus points if it was off-topic, or more than once per thread, or otherwise against the rules.  (It wasn't)

Also, BARR never burned any dead coins.  So when you say "clearly", it's limited by your own lack of comprehension. 

The people in the thread expressed a desire to get money for their Bitconnect.  Hundreds of them, and that's the topic of conversation.  
But there's nobody in the world who offered them any money for their Bitconnect.  So the conversation continued.
Then I showed up, and I was the only person in the world who thought I might be able to offer them something.  
In keeping with their existing conversation, I suggested a possible way for all the hundreds of people there to get what they had been discussing and wanting.

And you have a problem with that, which doesn't make you look too good.

But what I said was just a suggestion, since it doesn't exist, and it would only be possible through my own personal funds, with no possibility of profit for me.
Giving people my personally-earned altcoins if they burn their coins is not a service I run, or have ever run.
It's not anything I'm selling, or anything I'm asking them for money for, or stand to profit from, or have a website for.
Even if every Bitconnect user had agreed to my suggestion, it wouldn't involve any of them sending me any coins, or money,
or anything but messages and work that I would have to do by myself.

So it doesn't fit a normal person's definition of an advertisement.  But it fits yours.  

My possible proposed offer - which would have been the only offer in the world to all those hundreds of Bitcointalk users for something they could do with their Bitconnect - was erased without my consent, and without their consent, by an anonymous person who has the power to control those people's lives and take away their freedom to choose what they can do with their Bitconnect.

You're clearly advertising it as something that burns dead shitcoins. So is it a block explorer, a pool, or an exchange? Those are the three exceptions allowed. Random altcoins/services are not.

What is my "service", in your opinion?  You're well-informed, right?  So tell me, since you're so certain about it. 

What service are you talking about?  BARR, a decentralized altcoin? 

So an altcoin is now a service, according to you. 

According to mprep, in the link you just linked, I didn't break any rules.
He also confirms that I was completely correct, and that you were completely incorrect in your disagreement against what I said.

I posted once per thread, about a possible exchange or swap that was directly related to the coin.  I used no bold, no images, no codes, no advertisements.
Then when someone asked me more about it, I posted once as part of the discussion which is allowed.  Don't be a fascist.

So like I said, there are moderators who don't follow the rules, abuse their positions, and just do what they feel like no matter the consequences in people's lives.  And you fully support them.







When you and I were in the same thread almost 5 years ago, I never told you that you deserved to be banned.
Was I wrong?  You were saying some things that were pretty off-topic:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=912034.540

There are some exceptions but your service does not qualify for any of those: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/advertising-spam-is-not-allowed-718124