Topic: (PETITION) The act of BUYING/SELLING Bitcointalk.org Accounts (Poll) (Read 5567 times)

It will last as long as the why hasn't my activity changed? and the why can't I post anywhere? threads  .

I hope you're wrong

It appears so. I'm sure this debate will rage as long as Bitcointalk exists itself.

Are we still seriously talking about this? No one likes the act of buying/selling accounts but we are not going to stop it. The staff have made that very clear.

And they have decided, but I agree with you.

I guess this was made since people would sell/buy them anyway but allowing it in public made it even more popular and even more people doing it as it's "not against the forum rules".  Anyway that's for the admin to decide.

Lol

Haha. You should've bought some feedback from him too.

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Again, whatever the opinion is, this will never change

Weights seem pretty straight forward on public opinion. 75% against it. Man.

Fair enough, in proper context, I mean Theymos.

Not staff decision either, admin.

That post was so well written, so I quoted it. Not saying I'd do that, in response to BadBear as I do value my time and couldn't be bothered to create/sell accounts as it also goes against my ethics. As for catching sellers, you're right, the sellers could use Tor, or some sort of proxy to mask their origin, mind you, they will never know where the buyer comes from. There are SMF forum modules that can geolocate/flag users that "appear to be here" and suddenly within the next sign in, "be somewhere else so far away so fast".. etc. Facebook does a pretty decent job at that, and like I've mentioned before, so does vBulletin (with the right coded modules). It all depends on how strict a policy Bitcointalk has on counteracting this.

The point of the poll, is to see and discuss different viewpoints. Ultimately, even if nothing changes, it's just a sample of the forum population.. and what their thoughts are on it. Right now it looks heavily weighted on the "prohibit" side of things lol.. again, not their decision, but the staff right?

Yes you are. Theres no rules against it, because it would be impossible to stop you from doing so if you had the correct Proxy setup, or used Tor. Its up to the seller's ethics to do their best not to sell to scammers, although scammers can get ahold of the accounts. There are legitimate reasons to buy accounts as well, for example wanting to skip newbie jail, or wanting the username, or even using it for paid signature advertising.

I'd think that scammers may not have the best of luck around here, even after buying accounts, as hopefully, just about no one is trusted, and if they slip up, they get labled a scammer, and are out their money. As well as if they spam for the paid signature advertising, they will get banned and also be out of the money they paid to you.

Could we catch some account sellers? Probably, but more than enough would get through to do damage. Its easy enough to see accounts that have been inactive since 2011 being sold, however what if you were to raise an account up until mid january, sell it in late january, or even february. How hard would it be for the seller to post on the account once or twice per day to keep it active? They would also be increasing the post/activity count and making it more valuable. That wouldn't be very suspicious, especially amongst the other 200,000 acounts. We need to be able to catch all or none. If we don't catch all, people who have old accounts will be trusted, which they shouldnt. If we catch none, no one is trusted, and thats how it should be.

Had several of those people already, it wasn't worth their time so they just moved on to directly scamming people. Knock yourself out though, if you don't value your time very highly.

Now, that's great and all, but from what I understand, and I'm just throwing this out there but, in theory that means, I can create virtually any amount of accounts I want, contributing quality posts until they all get to say.. Full or senior member, and then sell these accounts at a profit when there is a large demand and get away with it? Not sure if that's what you meant, because there are people willing to do that almost systematically. It's not difficult to write insightful posts or threads with a little bit of thinking, and maybe some creativity. Just being the devils advocate here.

Imo, there are ways to automate account selling detection. It's been done before. Not necessarily the selling part, but it's easy to spot the activity. It's not impossible, or difficult for that matter. I'll gladly set it up in turn for a staff position here if it came to that.

^^

Users of this forum are not technologically retarded and could get around bans.  So you ban users for posts you feel are off-topic.
Of course, the not-technically-retarded users get butthurt and make 10 new accounts to spite you.  Way to win.  If banning doesn't work, don't do it.  Or get good at it, either way.


Users of this forum might not be technically retarded, but we must be retarded in just about every other way.  I mean, to understand that accounts could be bought, we must continuously see accounts traded under our noses, lest we forget.

Yor friend,

Derpy Hooves^~

But even with 100,000 votes saying, "No account selling shouldn't be allowed" it wouldn't change anything. It is allowed for the reason that has been mentioned probably over 1000 times now conservatively. Its unenforcable, and to say otherwise is just deluding ourselves. Sure, we can say no account selling, and then people will be caught off guard, as the community here isn't technologically retarded (correct use of the word). It will happen anyway, and people will lose a bit of their suspicion, figuring that all old accounts are their original owners, and that they couldn't have just been purchased off of Ebay for $20. People keep saying, "other forums have detection methods!" A *insert type* forum doesn't have the userbase who knows that they can get around any and all tracking methods, nor do they have 200,000 members.

Some of the responses in this thread are complete nonsense, I agree; but we're dealing with something that I thought I'd highlight about this community. This thread is merely a sample of the forum's population to get the sense of how we feel about the topic at hand as a community.