Topic: raising awareness about some madness here - page 2. (Read 1533 times)

I don't want to ban people, I quite dislike it actually, I think everyone should be free to express themselves here with minimal restrictions. I've declined to ban people many times up to now for this, and I've been wracking my brain thinking of ways to deal with it without having to ban people. The longest running thread in the staff forum besides the ban request thread is a thread about the paid signature campaign and how to deal with it. It's a huge issue. This spam has to stop, people are making worthless post after post and drowning out good discussion with complete garbage and it's ruining this forum.  

 The only thing that has been done about it is this.

After this, they just upped their payments in order to attract more of the higher ranking members. And the risk? What risk? It's really hard to get banned here, you have to be a spambot or a complete idiot to get banned here. There is no risk, which makes this measure completely and utterly worthless, and that obviously isn't what theymos intended if you read that post. There needs to be some risk, and I'm going to make sure there is, or else I'm failing everyone on this forum in my duties as a moderator. I've made many posts with suggestions on how to fix this issue without having to resort to banning people, but in reality none of them really work without punishing everyone. I don't like that it's come to this, but it's necessary.

Well I personnally would go with : Not make a lot of posts that are one-liners, off-topic, in the off-topic section or answers that are clearly just answering the headline without reading the other posts after including a signature advertisement. But that's just me.

It wasn't mprep, it was me, he was just passing along some useful info that he has and thought would be useful for you guys.

It is meaningless to just look at the post count. You should consider the post quality as well.

A new user making 10 spam posts all over the board should be banned, even if he has only made 10 posts.
An user making 100 posts a day is okay as long as his posts are all useful and constructive.

I placed the warning since that specific thread was gaining over 5 pages per day of absolute spam/clutter and the alt section has been troublesome for a long time. Most of these spamming were newbies with one or two posts (usually zero or low quality as well) and I only banned newbies since I only have jurisdiction over that member group. The warning was even put at the top of the thread. That means:

1. They haven't even read the first page of the thread, not talking about the whole thread.
2. They don't contribute to the discussion.
3. They cause serious clutter and bump down any worthwhile thread.

That's the classification of a spammer. Also, could you link exact profiles of the banned members you are talking about?

EDIT: Regarding the paid signature, every moderator is human being just like everyone else. I can have my own opinion and I can choose whom to endorse or advertise. We're not mindless drones.

And the post count? I've been here for over 2 years and have been fully active (as seen by my activity) for 420 days. That would mean that I posted during the active period around 10 posts per day - a normal amount for an active forum participant. I've actively spent (as it can be seen here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/mprep-51173) around 26 days and 9 hours in front of the forum. That is 37980 minutes spent here. So I've posted a post around every 10 minutes of my time spent here - much less than these active participants you are talking about, which I didn't ban.

What makes you think it was mprep? As far as I'm aware it was Badbear doing the banning (and possibly others). mprep just seemed to be giving you guys a friendly warning there which is probably more than what most of the other mods would do. I'm not sure whether individual users were given a warning prior to their ban or not, but if they weren’t I'm sure a warning would've been a better option first, but I guess the users who have been banned for a week or so can consider that as their warning now.

So some days ago mprep posted this:


You could say that this is a reasonable waring and I'm not going to disagree with that. But it wasn't until today. Myriads of accounts started getting banned without any personal warning or any given reason. Spam, insubstantial posts is the message you'd get if you were banned today. Most of the forum's frequent contributors are currently banned! I don't know if this was a global decision from the staff's part or if mprep is doing this for his own reasons but anyhow. Let me just point out some facts for the sake of the forum's well being.

mprep is the only staff member to use a paid signature

He has more than 4000 posts with his account and most of them are rarely contributing to the community in some way.

This makes the staff look bad. I know that there are people in this forum that have helped the community become what it is today. I don't know if it's too late to revise the bans because maybe the damage has already been done. But other forum staff should be aware of this and take apropriate action. In my humble opinion people like mprep are not loyal and suitable enough to hold such a position in this forum. Removing him from the staff would be the least that could be done right now.

But whatever the case is. The fact that mprep is being paid to post while most of his posts are in fact useless makes this whole situation ridiculous. If it wasn't him banning people then why would he be the one to put out a warning regarding spam while he's the single most "spammy" staff member?

EDIT: As quoted below, a post from BadBear

It seems like BadBear handled out the bans for all members other than newbies. The points he makes are fair, but here's what frustrates me:

• He gives no warning before he bans people
• There are no clear guidelines on how not to get banned meaning that anyone would be banned without any given warning or reason

If BadBear wants a personal all out attack against signature campaign participants he can have it. But to me, this should not be the way to solve his personal issue. Given the above, he is able to ban anyone at anytime for any reason he thinks is apropriate. And that's something that shouldn't happen that easily.

He's just baning accounts by following his own opinion blindly. Do you really believe that he should be able to ban people just because he hates the fact they're participating in a signature campaign?

Final edit: You can see and judge for your own. There was some quite good discussion below. I'm going to leave the previous posts/edits above as is just for the record. But one last thing before I'm out. A warning would have also been taken seriously as well. But in fact, no warning was sent to any user because from what the situation seems to be like, the goal of the temp bans was to spread chaos and fear and make people scared to post more of what some members of the staff consider spam.