Thank you Legendster and Deathwing. For your support and opinion respectively.
You are not required to be expert of bitcointalk, reading the forum rules require having knowledge on English only.
Does the forum rule dictate that not knowing something is a bannable offense? Or is it that being duped into believing that we are buying original design is also our fault?
Sure, I admit, whoever was handling the account back then, was in fact unaware of all the nitty-gritty of this forum and its rules, but I am sure that person did not want to plagiarize some content and then pay money to advertise here. We as a company do not care about cutting corners for a few bucks.
And from what I understand, this forum has had hundreds of signature campaigns and banner ads displayed. How are we supposed to check for plagiarised design work, if we did not have the experience of using this forum in the past? Besides, it is not text, that we could just run it on copyscape or any plagiarism checker and know if it is an original design or not. To check that, we need experience or intel, neither of which we possessed at the time.
People that are more experienced in this forum or the moderators could have informed us of the matter, we would have certainly taken actionable measures. But instead, the account was banned without us even contending the matter.
We are not here to point fingers and we will not do that as I feel that is not important. We are here to mend an honest mistake that was made because of the lack of our experience in this forum. We would appreciate some official voice letting us know what we can do henceforth and would request the same.
That should enable us to forge a strong presence in this forum and engage with the community here responsibly - without being exiled from here completely.
Does the forum rule dictate that not knowing something is a bannable offense? Or is it that being duped into believing that we are buying original design is also our fault?
No to both, but think of from the moderation team's perspective, how would they know this? They are possibly checking hundreds of accounts per day for similar violations. They're humans too.
And from what I understand, this forum has had hundreds of signature campaigns and banner ads displayed. How are we supposed to check for plagiarised design work, if we did not have the experience of using this forum in the past?
Browsing through Services section should help you greatly, you can see the signature campaign threads and check what they have included, what is their signature code etc. Although you may not be able to check about five hundred different signatures, you will definitely find one or two similar in the end. However, the main point is that if you are hiring someone to do the signature creation for your website/project you should be sure about their reputation. It's very, very easy to edit a BBCode of another campaign to make it look like yours, which appears to be the case here.
People that are more experienced in this forum or the moderators could have informed us of the matter, we would have certainly taken actionable measures. But instead, the account was banned without us even contending the matter.
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, the mods deal with hundreds of accounts every single day. Imagine if every single account were given a chance to explain themselves on outright plagiarism as your signature had in the first place. The backlog would be enormous. Plagiarism is a really serious offence here on Bitcointalk.