Bitcoin Forum

If someone had a 1+ year of straight good posting history to get a pass, why not just leave the signature blocked with a blank space? I would say it's not too motivating to post while people bully you around and make witty remarks about you being a fraud because you did something wrong 5 years ago. Way to disincentive good posters from posting for the duration of the ban. They will probably leave until the ban is gone not because they don't want to post but because you are carrying that sign which can be used by people to attack you instead of addressing the post (typical in discussions in which someone doesn't agree with you and just use something else that isn't part of the point, like a grammar mistake or physical defect etc...). Just leave it blank IMO... otherwise as I said, I predict the people that get a pass aren't going to bother with participating on the forum.

Edit: I didn't realize that the signature is not shown on every post, so there's nothing to discuss here anymore. I still believe people should be given second chances, specially when the mistakes were made ages ago and currently some of the banned people were better posters than people currently being on highly respected campaigns such as chipmixer.

They just have to learn how to ignore does type of replies or make use of the ignore button if they noticed same reply from a particular user and they feel offended by those comments. You can't stop people from acting childish, Irrespective of whether you're wearing a signature, not wearing one or wearing the sig banned message, if trolls or whatever they call themselves wants to attack you they'll.

The sig banned message is passing a loud message to who ever sees it (on their profile). You commit plagiarism, you get punished so I don't support the idea of removing it.

Then we will not know who really wants to keep posting without getting paid and who doesn't, since the lack of motivation to post while wearing that signature is understandable. So you can't have mods stating how people became inactive due not getting paid. This would be the case if you had a neutral (blank) signature.

The message is only displayed when directly viewing the profile and is not under every message they post.

It remains that plagiarism is very unethical (in addition to being harmful to the forum), and is not unlike stealing when the person believes no one is watching.

I see the message as a warning to anyone who will potentially consider paying for advertising in the future that the person may not be someone who will be the most effective advertiser. I also do not believe this warning to be inappropriate.

I think for the most part, someone who is banned from wearing a signature is probably not going to be posting very much anyway, and mostly were here solely for the signature money.

They were good advertisers up until someone digged posts from 5 years ago to report them. Now im afraid a year from now when the ban is gone, no one is going to hire them because of that instead of giving them a fair chance.

Like I said, what they did is very similar to stealing money (from advertisers) when they believe no one was looking.

I am not sure this is something I would want associated with my business. It is also an added risk because these people have shown themselves willing to try to obtain money under false pretenses.

Many of the reported posts weren't even part of a sig campaign. Just accounts trying to rank activity.

The main point here is, they were doing a good job. If everyone had your mentality ("let's not hire this guy ever again because he did something wrong in the past, even if he was doing a good job now"), everyone that did something wrong in the past would remain unemployable, the end result being a collapsing society thus one would be forced to steal since you have to eat.

People here may need to steal to eat, but it's not the forums duty to provide for them.

To your original point if anyone is offended by what someone says on the forum because they carry the label of their crimes they can do a couple of things:

• Grow thicker skin
• Use the ignore button
• Leave
• Go back in time and not fuck it up

I doubt any of these people will remain unemployable, for one simple fact. If they don't have negative feedback someone will employ them. If they are a decent poster someone will employ them, hell we see shitposters get paid everyday. It doesn't matter why the post got picked up, it matters that they exist. So if they really want to be a part of the community they just need to keep showing up, accept their punishment and move on.

Signature advertising should not be someone's job. If this is someone's primary source of income, they are not someone we particularly want here.

I am not saying someone should absolutely, under no circumstances ever get hired to advertise on their signature again if they are caught plagiarizing. I am saying potential advertisers (employers) should be warned as to their history so they can take this information into consideration.

There are a decent amount of circumstances in which I would *not* personally hire someone who previously plagiarized, especially if they tried to cover it up after they were caught.

I obviously don't mean that someone should me making a living in here. My point was in general a society: If you don't give second chances, you are ostracizing them into stealing to survive.

How is this not a second chance? Just because there is still a punishment involved and some people may not want to deal with them in the future, the leniency isn't gone from their situation.

I wasn't even aware of this until I read OP's post.  I have signatures blocked, so I don't see any of them and I figured that when members got a signature ban, their sig field would just be blank.  Interesting that Theymos decided to put a message there instead--and I agree with you, it does send a loud & clear message about plagiarism.  Obviously either don't read the rules or don't think they're going to get caught copy/pasting, so maybe this is exactly what we need.

And as far as the hurt feelings resulting from the 'scarlet letter' sig-banned members have to wear, I don't have much sympathy for them.  They're lucky they're still able to post instead of getting a permaban. 

In addition, I haven't heard any teasing or taunting yet and somehow I don't think it's really going to be an issue.  The vast majority of members here are just shitposting and wouldn't even bother to say anything negative about someone's sig message.  And I mean, come on.  This forum is freakin' brutal enough as it is.  If you don't have a thick skin, this isn't the forum for you.

I don’t think the ban message being displayed is preventing anyone from getting a second chance.

I totally agree with the OP. Those signature bans are not working out, stupid idea, let's go back to permabans - lets bitching that way.

Their sig field is blank only when they will post and on all of their previous post. This message is only displayed when you click to view profile. The message will be loud and clear when you make this ban message as their sig. message on all the post they posted till now.

This whole mentality around 'we were good advertisers' is just wrong.

No care about adding value to the forum, no care about actually engaging on blockchain or any topic - just 'we were good advertisers'. As if bitcointalk should be a spam platform.

If you have a signature, that's a bonus. Your ability to 'advertise' is not the primary purpose of this forum.

The fact that you think being able to advertise actually counts as an argument speaks volumes of your attitude to this forum, and probably your respect and knowledge for cryptocurrency more broadly.

By good advertisers I mean good posters in general, not "good salesmen". Some of the banned people with 5+ years of experience had a better knowledge of Bitcoin than you do so calm down.

I'm going to call you on that one. I have yet to see a single plagiarism case where a casual poster of the forum came here, accidentally plagiarized, and was punished. If people have plagiarized, it was because they came here with the intention to spam. I have zero sympathy for those so called "good posters" that got caught and had signature bans. If you are sufficiently talented to hide your spam in a way that never rouses any suspicion, I have no qualms with you, but I still wouldn't call you a good poster.

Just to be clear, I'm claiming that 100% of people that plagiarize did so to boost their post count intentionally with the intention of escaping detection. That means that they did not value their post enough to read a topic, come up with a somewhat insightful response, and reply. Rather they found a relevant post somewhere else and responded with no thought put in to furthering a discussion.

If they are good posters, then they can keep posting. A ban on your sig does nothing to stop that.

You're specifically arguing that you/they will be 'unemployable' because of being caught plagarizing - so my point stands. If transparency on an earlier ban makes you unable to get into sig campaigns well that's probably a good thing. There should be disincentives.

Reading back on your posts in this thread, the entire language and expectation you have around how you should be able to make money off signatures, being a good advertiser, needing to be employable and so on is entirely indicative of the problem with spam in this forum.

If these people are good posters first, and have a sig blog as a secondary point, then they will keep posting regardless of any sig bans.

This ---^

It basically invalidates the entire argument of this thread. It isn't like the user has this posted under every single one of their posts...


As for the whole "they'll be taunted in arguments intellectual debates" thing... oh, puhleeeeezzzz... "you got sigbanned so your argument is invalid" is about as effective as "you're a sigspammer so your argument is invalid"  ::) ::)

If someone has to stoop to that level... it's going to be fairly obvious to anyone with half a brain who is actually winning that debate ;)



I think you're giving too much credit to some of these users... insofar that I doubt that they believed or knew that they needed to escape detection of anything. Most of them haven't read the rules until they got banned and linked to the rules in their "I didn't break any rules Ban Appeal" threads. ::)

I was speaking about viewing their profile that's why I said "the sig banned message is passing a loud message to who ever sees it" if it was displaying on every post of theirs then everyone can see it but as it only display on the profile, (you'll have to view profile to see it that's why I said who ever sees it).

BTW: it'll be a brilliant idea if those sig banned message will be displayed on all their past, present and future post

If anything needs to change, I'd say the "Banned from displaying signatures until"-message should be visible under all their posts. That way, it can be used as a warning for others.

It's getting ridiculous. We have this thread, complaining that the tiny little warning only visible on their profile page is too much. We've had another thread complaining that a year or two is too long, and it should only be a few months instead. Next I'm sure we'll see a thread saying a complete signature ban is too much, and instead it should just be a signature downgrade to the next rank down, or something equally silly.

The punishment for plagiarism has just been downgraded from life imprisonment to 12 month parole, and still the spammers want more leniency.

I can't speak for this guy and I'm against his idea but the suggestion i made few days ago wasn't out of me been a spammer but I was just trying to contribute to the suggestions coming from different members of the forum.  The administratorss are experimenting better solutions to combating plagiarism and always open to suggestions. You shouldn't generalize your statement.

lets take a look here:

i think its fair to say that these two reasons make up the majority of cases of plagiarism; account farming and sig spam.
in addition:
i fully agree with this point, so  to follow, a proposal that i believe i havent seen yet:
remember that timer between posts? it requires you to wait 360 seconds between a post / pm / report for a newbie, and 4 seconds for hero members and up iirc. this is probably one of the most annoying things for actual users to go through as a newer member, so why not force this massive inconvenience onto plagiarizers? give them a special timer, something crippling, like 30 minutes (or even an hour) between actions on the forum.

i dont think this is a perfect solution by any means, but its an alternative that came to mind just now.

If someone is trolling the one who got signature ban then its completely okay to be in my opinion because it is not going to hurt them personally and this can be the best punishment for their mistake which was done yesterday or few years back.

Or the mods could decide to permaban someone (based on the quality (or the lack of quality) of his/her posts), or to give a second chance (sig.ban).
It's alway better to have a year sig ban, if you have an established account, because you would miss only one bull run, but you don't have to start you account from scratch...

Signature abusers spammers should also have this feature.

You mean getting sig bans for spamming? That's happening:

Nope I mean when someone is caught for abusing signatures with alts accounts when is not allowed.

Later they can join new signatures bounties especially for shitcoins (cause if they are caught they will probably redtrusted) and create useless spam on the forum.

I edited the post with this:

Edit: I didn't realize that the signature is not shown on every post, so there's nothing to discuss here anymore. I still believe people should be given second chances, specially when the mistakes were made ages ago and currently some of the banned people were better posters than people currently being on highly respected campaigns such as chipmixer.


Some of the banned people has contributed better content than you do. So no, it's not completely okay to bash them because they did a mistake years ago, specially not someone like you, give me a fucking break.

Not against forum rules. That's up for the manager to deal with.

Then you're better off locking topic since there's nothing to discuss here again and to prevent sig spamming also "people" i.e net positive and good for the forum users are getting a second chance so we good.

You do understand that "permaban" means "permanent ban" right? ???

The "person" is banned... so their original account is banned, any alts are banned and they are banned from making new accounts. There is NO "starting account from scratch" when you are permabanned.

I think that theymos has reasons to add such text in signature of permanent-banned users whom got temporary bans and signature bans after deeply review from admins or global moderators. Even theymos has never stated about the purposes of signature banned-text, I guess admin would want to do something:
Firstly, to remind banned-users a very strong Warning that this is a big rewards for them to come back (mostly due to their significant contributions in the past as well as minor, acceptable faults of plagiarism), and those users automatically receive the Warning every time they make each post. That is surely a very strong Warning, that repeatedly pops up and reminds those users for one- or two years-period with their posts.
Secondly, to remind other users in the forum about serious punishments of plagiarism, even users whom luckily enough to get alternative punishments.

---

Therefore, I think it is fine to leave such text in Signature space of unbanned users.

I have no problem with my “I’m an idiot and fckd up” banner. I’d have accepted much worse.  I deserve it, and so does anyone else who had or will be issued one. We all make mistakes in life, it’s about acknowledging them, getting back up, correcting your mistakes, moving on, and doing better.

If that's the case, then you can lock the thread now.

That comment really highlights the problem. This forum is an information exchange, and a self-help community. It isn't an unpaid billboard for advertising products - especially as some of them appear to be of questionable value.

I would want the OP to see it this way. You cannot keep something hidden in a public forum, if you are advocating that they should remove the ban form display because(as some of your reasons implies) of some people might get trolled.

Should they also remove trust rate from showing because people will troll you for getting negative trust and some also troll for getting positive trust(they say he/she doesn't deserve it or might have gotten it from a click).

Or also should they remove merit count from displaying because people can also troll you for it when you don't have any merit you can get trolled and even when you do have can also still get trolled.
 
The forum is more concerned about upholding transparency than giving in to trolls, injustice, reputation of members etc. 
So I ask you is that not the right thing to do(even after been lenient)

I don't know if it has been proposed (I haven't read Meta in the last few days), but I will add another line saying "Read the rules (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=703657.0)".
It would somehow become a "useful" sanction.

I know what 'permaban' is...
Is is really working that if someone has been permabanned, all of his/her alts are banned automatically? I would love this feautre, this would kill account farming at one go

Unfortunately, it doesn't happen automatically... mostly because there is no back-end system link between alt accounts. That requires "humans" to identify alts (generally self admitted or linked from same BTC addresses being used etc)

But using alts is considered ban evasion, so if you get caught and reported, then the alt account will also be banned.