Bitcoin Forum

I'm requesting a ban for user Snowshow (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3456891) due to violation of three forum rules. Specifically, ban evasion, troll posting and pointless talking.

1. Ban evasion.
Snowshow is the person behind multiple accounts, one of which is already banned. Specifically: fxsurfer (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=1188943) (banned), antikvark (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2678368), Antithesis (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=3336205). Besides raising the same kind of "issues", such as "Bitcoin has no value", "Satoshi lies", "Bitcoin doesn't exist", "Bitcoin exists to Satoshi's imagination" etc., they also have similar writing style.

Let me find some strong similarities that make a splash:

Numbers in a database:

Satoshi Nakamoto fools the world:

YouTube videos FTW:

Casino mania:

In fact, he's even reported of evading ban before (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5228148.0).

2. Troll posting
This scumbag appears to annoy the Bitcoin Discussion board by making the same kind of posts wherein he reveals his completely lack of comprehension of the subject. No matter how many times we've debunked all these concerns he does did have, he'll just continue seeking for attention with the same nonsense; "Bitcoin is a scam", "Bitcoin doesn't exist", "Bitcoin is Nakamoto's ponzi scheme" etc.

3. Pointless discussion
As you might have understood so far, there's no point in having a conversation with him, because what he wants is to just make some noise so a few Internet strangers can take the time to engage with him. His furious behavior to create alts, just to be proved right, no matter the endless list of arguments we've used, proves it.

In 19th this month, he made another thread: Bitcoins are Not Real — Or how People Blindly Accepted Nakamoto's Nonsense (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5410448.0). Can we just give an end to this drama?

I disagree to ban Snowshow because of his drama creating non sense thread about Bitcoin, but I agree to ban Snowshow because of evading ban. I think theymos itself don't like a user which evading ban, I believe he can easily investigate by the IP address and if it's same, theymos can directly ban all of his accounts.

What if people (including you) start ignore his account, so you wouldn't see a drama created by him anymore.

I think such thread should be moved to off topic section.

Pointless discussions and trolling are against the rules, unless you're arguing he makes essential threads.

If we all start ignoring him, it'd have the same consequences as banning him. Why don't we do the latter since it's easier?

Absolutely not. This cancer is responsible for the most popular board's pollution. It's a topic that concerns the community. I've reported his recent thread, but it's stayed on "handle" for a day. That's the reason I submitted this request; I'm sure more users are annoyed. 

I have no doubt that it is the same person and that if ban evasion could be proven, the matter would be completely clear - but I personally do not remember that someone was permanently banned for trolling or pointless discussion. Given that the user did not use any coin addresses or social network accounts that could be a link between his alt accounts, the only option left is to check IP addresses, but if it's a VPN or TOR, even that can be a dead end.

I personally think that ignoring members like this is not the best solution, because there will always be those who will somehow support him in pointless discussions, and one of his threads has even 42 pages. If the user does not get a perma ban, the only thing left for us is to be persistent in reports and not to support him by replying to his meaningless posts.

It is against forum rules but in most of cases, forum members don't get ban with this violation.

Even with very serious case, it is only temporarily ban and barely happens.

I don't know you knew or not, but the case of game-protect (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=874254) is a very good example. Even the community asked to ban that one, it won't happen. Until he changed from trolling to doxing. He got 2 or 3 temporary ban and the last one is permanent ban (mainly because of doxing).

@Marlboroza tried to achieve the same thing (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5228148.0) few years ago to no avail so unfortunately I don't think that you will succeed either.


Was there ever a similar case, where someone got banned via shared IP address with the previously banned account?

I think only admins can do that since they have access to IP logs that Mods don't have, but from the look of things, admins seem to be rarely involved in banning users.

More like the case of the humanrightsfoundation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5179710.0), the user would get banned immediately as soon as any of his sockpuppet accounts were discovered.

I don't agree for Toll posting and Pointless discussion he should be banned. Many users trolled in the past. CH was the last troll who is in my memory but before him we had many. None of them were banned for trolling. Pointless discussion is subjective. So it's hard to make a gesture from it.

If the user is really can be banned again then it's the ban evading. But whats the point? He will come back with another account and will keep doing the same until you or someone else find the connection again.

Part of the issue comes back to this is one of the few places on the internet that allows his kind of junk to be posted. I have been online since 300 baud modems of the 1980s with dial up BBS. Rambling crap like he posts was not tolerated then. Moving into the CompuServe era and everything else discussion was always permitted, but deliberalte trolling like his and your account got banned.

Every other place I frequent, be it motorcycle boards, tech boards, whatever trolls are removed. Some of the more fun admins have shadow ban settings where they are the only ones that can see their posts so they can troll on but nobody sees them.

Here, although against the 'rules' it seems to be permitted.
As others have pointed out unless certain lines are crossed, they get to stay. I guess page views are more important the quality.

-Dave

I know about this member Snowshow, aka antikvark, aka Antithesis, aka fxsurfer (banned), and he is well known in Croatian local board for his bad reputation.
We don't know why he is making new profiles all the time but we suspect he is some government rat with a lot of free time in his life.
I support permaban for all his accounts because of ban evasion and trolling, but I am also sure he is going to come back with new account after that :/

I don't know, but you can't register in forum again if IP address connected with your banned account is used again.
So he is probably using some vpn to get different addresses for registration.

This lunatic finally got tired creating new accounts, but he is much worse and he made multiple death threats in forum :D

What's the point of cleaning your room if it's going to get messed up again, right?

And I'm about to report every one of their new shit-threads the moment they appear in my email inbox. Not gonna be a hard process, their text contain phrases such as "Bitcoin doesn't exist", "Bitcoin is a number", "Who gives $21,000 for number '1'?", "You're foolish for investing in Nakamoto's scheme" etc.

Because, unfortunately, punishment isn't enforced. The rules are there, and are violated. Isn't there one mod responsible for this? I just want a response. Am I wrong for requesting this?

Nope, you are 100% correct. But as others that have been here longer then you and me have said, nothing seems to happen.
We report, and complain and report and complain and nothing changes.
The mods / admins seem to like their spam.

The sad part really is that if his posts were actually deleted nobody would complain. It's not like there is any justification for all the ramblings.

-Dave

The rule against ban evasion is rarely enforced, and is generally only enforced if the person has caused major problems in the past. I think the administration would rather have someone participate in the community in a constructive manner than someone be excluded from the community. If someone is participating in the community constructively today, in general they will likely be allowed to stay, even if they have an old account that was banned.

If we're looking for precedent, I'd cite Anonymint as a disruptive troll who was repeatedly banned and then subsequently banned for ban evasion.  And this user is like an even more obnoxious Anonymint.  Which is a sentence I never thought I'd utter.

I think ignoring the account will not give a solution to this issue at hand. Snowshow, antikvark, Antithesis, fxsurfer they are all here to campaign against bitcoin. And the leader of them all is Snowshow. If Snowshow and his accounting farming accounts are here speaking bad on bitcoin, he or she is doing worst in real life. So the best option for him as for me is to ban and delete all the accounts related to the user. Why I said delete because if it is banned the user name can still be seeing in the forum software but if it is deleted, just like it has been rooted from the forum so there will be no trace. And the drama he or she is performing will be no where to be found. It is good to move it to off topic but people would still see it there because sometime we go there to read some trash and to got information. Snowshow who is the spearheaded leader of the drama group should be ban. Because he did not understand bitcoin and he his not here to learn.

Dang, I was going to write the exact same thing myself--I don't have any problem with someone blasting bitcoin, even if it's with lies, because I believe everyone should be free to express their thoughts no matter how twisted they are.  Lies and misinformation can be countered with truth, and if that doesn't work there's always the ignore button.

But if someone's already been banned and is using alt accounts so that they can continue posting, that's another story.  I agree that those other accounts have a very similar style of writing, but I'm not sure that's going to be proof enough for the mods.

Wow, I thought I was an old-timer.  I remember the internet of the early 90s (sort of), but I never participated in BBS or anything like that.  But either way, bitcointalk is quite a bit different than most forums around in terms of censorship, and I wouldn't want to see it as strict as it was way back then.

fxsurfer/snowshow started his trolling career on the biggest Croatian forum (forum.hr) at least 5 years ago but they are not so hesitant to ban obvious ban evaders/trolls so he gets banned as soon as someone spots his new account. In the end he started avoiding it and instead focused on bitcointalk where on top of having bigger audience he can get away with one alt account after another, even though its obvious who is behind them.



Hm care to share some proof of that as somehow I doubt it given all the ban evasion that is going on. And do you mean you literally can't register, or there is that evil fee thing if you try to create new account?

I really agree on this, the ignore button is way better than us having to talk to people like that who don't really care about the truth. I've advised that user to stop all his bullshit, but I don't think I've succeeded either so I've considered the ignore button. LOL

I can't make a speech on the wall, it's a complete waste of time. So I hope others will too.

https://i.imgur.com/viHt0vb.png

I think he is talking about evil points. Evil points get added to your IP address and similar ranges if you do some "evil". Remember that we had those cases in the Croatian section where it was reported that friends of our local community members couldn't register because their newly-created accounts got evil points assigned to them? That happened despite them never having used Bitcointalk before. That's also one of the reasons why we have some users who can now whitelist accounts that have been branded as evil.

I don't think IPs get banned here because many people use VPNs and TOR. It would just create more problems.

Agree with you.

Ignore button is good to keep spammers out of sights and liars out of non sense discussions. For spammers I only ignore. For people who can discuss with, I use the feature to block DM as well because with these ones, public discussions or DMs don't solve anything. Just kind of wasting time and bringing some unnecessary emotion.

There is evil fee you need to pay for that specific IP address if your banned account was using that same IP address.
So that means that you can't complete registration and write anything in forum until you pay random amount of coins.
I doubt Snowshow would pay with bitcoin for creating new accounts, but maybe this made him even more angry and motivated to write against Bitcoin  :D

Makes you wonder how much letting people like him stay along with all the other shit poster and such hurt BTC in general.
Imagine coming here as a new BTC and seeing all the crap that is permitted. Same with the altcion section and so on.
I do spend a fair amount of time here, but I do seem to be less and less active since I really don't always have the time to wade through crap.

-Dave

I think so. But, let him be angry and write whatever he wants about Bitcoin. Probably he will write nonsense things (which he is already writing). But, You can easily give him a counter answer if he is not correct. Possibly he could point out some bad sides of Bitcoin, such as volatility (this is also a good thing). But, we know. There are a lot of good things that can be written about Bitcoin. So, I don't think he should be banned for writing against Bitcoin. Let's have some haters/enemy types of people who can criticize you. Oh dang, I just noticed The Pharmacist already wrote almost the same thing.

That troll just won't let go. He keeps making the same arguments, which have already been proven invalid, over and over in the hope that someone will fall for it. He's not willing to let go of his worldview, so every time he gets challenged on something he has said, he just makes up some other spin that is equally invalid. He's like a dog chasing his tail. He never catches it, but he keeps trying anyway. It's a waste of time and energy to try to have a discussion with someone like this. He's not open to the possibility of being wrong, because he has convinced himself that he's right about everything. The only way to deal with him is to ignore him completely and move on with your life.

Not that I remember people in this forum talking about, but I have a friend that tried registering on this forum ~two years ago and got that evil fee thing without doing anything wrong. He even tried using VPN but all those IPs that he used were flagged as well so in the end he gave up, and he didn't want to accept me paying the fee. He was really turned off by that approach (even though fee was very small) and I must say that I can't blame him because if that happened to me when I registered on this forum, 99.99% I would just give up and continued discussing crypto related stuff on forum.hr where I was for years before I came here. God knows how many users were lost that way.



That's not entirely true as from my understanding you can register the account, its just that you can't post until you pay. I also think that its not a random amount of BTC that you have to pay but instead it depends on the amount of evil you have.



Keep in mind that arguing with him is a convenient way of filling up your signature quota so there is always someone willing to argue with him, even though they know its completely pointless.

On the reverse side of the coin, you have to be amazed by his indefatigability; I'd think that someone who could persist for months in writing the same garbage after being refuted by almost everyone must be a Turing-complete program written as a prank.