Bitcoin Forum

I mean this is so fucked up that he must have some sort of special ability.

It's impossible to have any kind of discussion on P&S without him derailing it. He just goes through every thread and posts off topic nonsense. Reported about a million times, nothing ever happens.

Most recent replies in P&S right now:

https://meem.link/i/e2vddjd4.png

Where's Flying Hellfish when you need him? (seriously, where did he go off to?)

Suchmoon, not being an aficionado of the P&S section, I have to ask: do you visit there to participate in the insanity or just to help keep it clean via reporting?  If it's the latter, I'd suggest taking a mental health break from it for a while.  P&S has always been a cesspool of conspiracy theories and whatnot, probably ever since it was created.  At least that's what I've heard; it's been on my ignored sections list pretty much since I registered.

Does P&S even have an active moderator right now?

I participate in a few threads and generally it's fine except for a handful of troublemakers. Some of them seem to be paid shills because they post drive-by spam and never engage in discussions, and then there's BADecker in a league of his own. Unfortunately the usual remedy (ignore) doesn't work because he persistently derails threads to shit.


None that I know of.

I don't have a problem with content (conspiracies and whatnot), I just can't understand what plausible benefit does BADecker bring for the forum that he must be allowed to spam like this.

FH has been inactive for years, with his last post in 2020, and having not logged in since June of last year. It appears that he has been removed from being a moderator and P&S does not currently have an active mod.

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I have noticed that BADecker often posts things that add little value to the conversation in P&S, and is not even a reply to a tangent that is off topic. I think a lot of his posts can be summed up as "yes" or "no" or something very similar.

He increases the forum's post count no matter what the quality of those posts is. ;D
People should create self-moderated threads more often, especially in boards with high amounts of spam such as P&S, Bitcoin Discussion, B&H, Gambling...
In my experience, the mods are rather quick to delete off-topic spam when I report it. I am not an active reporter but I do report things from time to time when I believe they shouldn't be there, and it gets handled.   

How does a report of yours look like for a post of his that should be deleted? What do you write there? Do the same type of reports you make get handled in other forum boards?

Share a few of those links here...

Helly was a pretty good buddy of mine. We chatted often off of btalk. Let me tell you he loved BADecker lol  Sadly I haven’t heard from him since he apparently had enough of moderating. I hope he’s okay, I will try and ping him on the outlets we’re connected on..just to get an all good reply would be enough for me. (Edit , well nvm..he’s no longer available on them  :'( )

My guess is they (BAD) are schizophrenic or something of that ilk..which breaks my heart because I understand how ungodly awful that disease is.

No dedicated moderator, theoretically global moderators, and patrollers (well and, admins) are the only ones that'll see reports there. The latter obviously only posts made by newbies that have been reported, which doesn't happen often.

Probably does need a moderator, although I do believe it'll be a difficult job finding someone who's impartial enough, that they don't just delete things that seem like utter crap because they don't agree with the users opinion, but also get rid of the stuff that is just low quality. I think off topic replies probably do need to be either split to a separate thread or removed, as I have found that it tends to happen a lot. Especially, when the history of one thread, and a debate sort of leaks into others.

BADecker's being doing this for years and has never been moderated. Might as well treat P&S as Off Topic 2 for all the spam in there. If you want an actual discussion on something, self moderation is a must.

I don't think it should be that difficult. There are plenty of people in P&S who post absolute nonsense, but at least manage to mostly stay on topic and can make a coherent post, even if the content of that post is moronic. And then there are people like BADecker and Tash who just post low quality and off topic trash which contributes absolutely nothing to any thread.

We delete off topic posts and posts which add nothing in other boards. Why not P&S?

I do agree somewhat, there's definitely a few cases of pretty straight forward off topic replies, or just genuinely low quality posts. Although, I do think you need someone in the P&S section that probably doesn't care all too much about politics, otherwise personal beliefs, and views can get in the way.

So, maybe looking at reporters list there, determining who has accurate reports, and then whether or not they've shown any particular strong views. Normally you probably want a moderator that's somewhat involved in that community/section, but I think P&S might be where that differs from the norm. I don't know the answer really, that's theymos' headache fortunately for us, but I do tend to agree that the section probably does need a little bit more scrutiny, which I do believe theymos knows hence him creating that thread a while back for elections.

I don't see the reports there, but I can just imagine the amount when users are debating, and then trying to get the other person's post removed. So, you've got that pressure from the general forum users to clean up the section, and then you've got to sift through the bad reports, which I'd have a guess it's higher than the average section.

There is not much to report on an off-topic post - I can try to describe why a post is off topic but the mod still needs to look into the thread and understand the context, they aren't just gonna take my word for it, are they? Anyway, I tried everything, from "off topic - not about XYZ, personal attack, link spam, etc" to just "off topic", doesn't seem to make a difference. I know someone is looking at those reports because if I report "multipost" it gets merged quickly. Not sure why "off topic" doesn't get even a Bad.


I didn't want to get into details because that may derail this thread as well.

Anyway, here is a thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5387774.0) where one user is sharing their experience in a... uhm... significant contemporary event. The topic of the thread is clear, it's not a discussion about the causes of the event etc (and there are plenty of threads about that). Yet BADecker steps in with copypasta and personal attacks and other garbage on page 5, and derails an interesting thread.

Or just browse his post history: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=149737;sa=showPosts

So even ignoring his repeated breaking of rules 1 and 2 (zero value and off topic)...

What about his plagiarism?

This post: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5391975.msg60185855#msg60185855
Same copy paste here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5311122.msg56231030#msg56231030
And here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5269905.msg55119252#msg55119252

All without any source provided, all taken from this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/robbystarbuck/status/1210703194252357637

Or maybe his death threats? https://ninjastic.space/post/60202521
Or this one? https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5249924.msg58340521#msg58340521
Or his hundreds of posts telling people to drink bleach?

Far better users have been banned for far less. But BADecker continues to be unmoderated, for reasons unknown.

I confess yesterday I could hardly restrain myself not to break loose.

I still can't get my head around how it is possible to be such a callous and brainless guy. I could report that plagiarism by creating a post in the appropriate thread, but what about the ethical side? I am an interested person and some may think that my post will be biased.

If 10 or 20 members report these posts as plagiarism in the right way (with the source), then I don’t see how anyone could ignore it. That member cannot be above the rules, even though P&S is one of the boards that is obviously completely out of the focus of the administration.

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Plagiarism or any other violation of the rules of the forum and their reporting should have nothing to do with any personal disputes or who is of which nationality. Just use the "report to moderator" button and report that post as plagiarism, and if enough of us do that, I don’t believe anyone will be able to ignore that. Vires in Numeris

What's up with BADecker and why is he here anyway? 96.2% (https://ninjastic.space/user/id/149737) of his posts belong to P&S and Off-Topic. I don't blame him for not talking about bitcoin often; it's obvious that he doesn't know what is he talking about (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5261835.msg54887225#msg54887225). Also, does anybody know why he ends each post with a "Cool" smiley?

Probably because there's no moderation in neither of the sub-forums he frequents.

Here's the thing: He's allowed to be callous, to be brainless, to post exclusively in P&S, and be completely misinformed about bitcoin. He can say things which piss people off, and he can say things which are provably incorrect, both of which he does regularly. None of that is reason to ban him, though.

But his repeated and blatant disregard for the few rules we have is. I've seen much less egregious cases of off topic spam being deleted, and I've seen much less egregious cases of plagiarism being banned. Why does he get special treatment?

Have you reported the posts?

I always assumed the rules were meant for threats against forum users only:
As for the second post: changing laws to make past events a crime goes against everything a decent society should stand for:
Advocating to change this, no matter what the subject is, is just dumb.

By the age someone can read, I'm hoping they're smart enough not to believe everything they read on the internet.

I don't think "voting" by sending in many reports helps.

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I barely read Politics & Society, and clearly I don't miss much. It's also much easier to keep a Switzerland image by not engaging in political discussions.

I'm certain I reported the first one, otherwise I wouldn't have known about it to reference it in this thread. I gave up reporting on P&S a long time ago though when it was clear that it was a waste of time.

I fall firmly in to the second post I linked, as I'm sure a handful of other forum users do too. That post is direct threat that I should be "hunted down and executed", in his words.

All of BADecker's posts could be described as dumb, but that is besides the point. Being dumb isn't against the rules. Off topic spam, zero value posts, plagiarism, and death threats are.

If I remember correctly, I had reported a few of his posts in the past, but to no avail. He'd ruin any threads I made regarding Covid or similar, along with the other conspiracy theorist, Tash. I don't really bother if you have a different opinion than mine, but constantly posting gibberish and spamming my threads is annoying to say the least. Because of these two users, I had locked a topic of mine due to the spam it had accumulated, just by those two. From now on, I'll resort to creating self-moderated threads, a feature I had completely forgotten about.

It may not always help, but I know from experience that some of my plagiarism reports only got handled when someone else reported the same post. If 10 people with a high reputation agree on something it will have a much bigger effect than if there is only one member behind it.

I can't speak for my cycle-mate, but I have reported BADecker's posts with all sorts of violations, including plagiarism. The only thing that is handled properly is multiposting, everything else is ignored.


See above. And I don't think any proper report from any member should be ignored.

Personally I would be willing to moderate that section.

What is the pay? Theymos can pm me if he wants to let me modify it.

I am willing to give theymos my kyc etc.

Btw as out there as badecker can be every once in a while he drops a golden nugget of info.

So at whomever is in charge of moderators please contact me via pm if you want me to modify that section.


edit sp as pointed out by Poker ♦️ Player

I take it you mean "moderate", not "modify", but I don't know if it is equivalent where you live in the US.

What about modifying or moderating the WO thread? You are a regular there, and suchmoon was complaining recently, as you may have seen.

My iPad auto correct is crazy I will correct the error.

I thought about modding a few times. If I do mod.

It would need be in threads/boards I do not post much in.

So the btc mining the alt coin mining and the wo/economic area I would not want to do.

BTW the wo thread can be very off the wall at times.

Well I will see if theymos and staff want me to try on P+S board.

FH was a left-wing Bernie bro, and IIRC was a supporter of communism. That is far from moderate, and he did care about politics.

IMO, it is more important for the P&S mod to be able to moderate in a way that is viewpoint neutral, and will not allow his views on topics of discussion interfear with his decision making.

I know BADecker very well and I can say that he is a very passionate person when he participates in a discussion, and that when he starts explaining or proving something he never gives up.
This applies not only to discussions in the PS part of the forum but also in the offtopic, more specifically on religious topics.
Take for example this topic I started in offtopic 8 years ago, and which I thought would last a couple of days or weeks: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.10360 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=737322.10360)
Thanks almost exclusively to BADecker, who had to discuss with every member of the forum who would disagree with his opinion in this topic, this topic has been active for 5 years and already has 519 pages  ;D
Given the decline in activity on this forum in recent times, forum administrators may not have anything against such discussions that keep the forum alive, but I see that in this stage, many members simply gave up the discussion with BADecker in this topic.
What the solution is and whether something needs to be done, I’m really not sure and I don’t know.
This is probably more of a question for forum moderators.

As I stated he was a buddy of mine and while he was definitely further left than I agree with, he is a good person who absolutely did not support communism. He just believed in bigger government than I see being ideal personally. Theymos and him didn’t agree on much, but still hired him which imo says a lot about them both. I had talks with HF about this very topic and I believe he truly tried to remain impartial as possible. It stressed him out with all the meta threads against him as it was always “HF is impartial etc etc”. Truth is mods delete stuff all the time. I’ve had plenty of stuff deleted I didn’t agree with but it’s a tough job and I know they do their best.

However I agree with you. I think, as Loyce always says, a Sweden type would prob be ideal. Then no one can
claim political bias in Meta.

Which is 100% not relevant due to his plagiarism.
For whatever reason the mods due not want to stop him.

Probably for the same reason that the altcoin / tokens sections are allowed to fester the way they do.
More posts = better to sell ad space and keep the forum up in google and other rankings.

Just my cynical view.

-Dave

I totally agree, maybe you know about King Scorpio, same league like BADecker. He's a troll from our german section but luckily he's not much active anymore because he's busy with his failed shitcoin (?). But we have some additional idiots, also from a shitposting perspective.
There was already borderline plagiarism and the affected account was told how to quote properly but he just doesn't care. There are tons more of derailing comments. We really don't need such negative-value trolls and should find a decetralized solution to discourage them. Could also be used for shitposters.

We should really think about how to solve that issue and a decentralized solution to get rid of their troll- and spamposts could be some sort of a de-merit system.
Yes, it has been discussed very controversely but if we do it right, we could get rid of some problems caused by low-quality posting, trolls, topic-derailing and similar.

How could we achieve a fair solution, difficult to get abused:

• Peg sendable de-Merit to earned Merit. For every earned Merit, 0.25 spendable de-Merit will be earned and earned de-Merit could be spent for low-quality posts, misleading content or troll spam. Pegging de-Merit to earned Merit would make sure to allocate a steady flow of spendable de-Merit to accounts knowing how to evaluate quality posts (and shitposts).
• If a low-quality post receives 1 de-Merit, his Merit score will be reduced by 1 and so on
• Ranking down is activated
• Negative total Merit count = posting disabled (new Forum Rank "Shitposter"  :D)

It would be a decentralized way how to solve the issue, don't require action from mods, would discourage bad posting and would be a 100% community driven consensus.

Oh yes, of course.


This has a potentially nasty side effect of silencing unpopular opinions. Perhaps some additional limits would be needed. Similar to how you can't send more than 50 merits per month to a single user, a limit of 5 or 10 demerits per user per month should apply.

But I doubt any such changes are forthcoming.

:-X

;)


+1
Something like that.
Before introducing it, a detailed community discussion would be beneficial where various points could be evaluated.
By doing so we could see if there's community support for it or not.

This sounds like a good idea, although I have a doubt, but it's not the core of the problem. The thing is, this proposal, disappointingly, reveals that this forum lacks on implementing these few rules it has. If a person plagiarizes, posts death threats, creates literally zero quality content and irritates the rest in a dozen other ways, we shouldn't just ignore him because there's a "Shitposter" below his username.

He has to to get banned.

Don't want to get too off topic here, and I like your enthusiasm, but I would disagree strongly with the implementation of such an idea.

Merit is already treated by many as a "I like this/I agree with this" button rather than a "This is a constructive post/This adds to the topic at hand, regardless of whether or not I agree with it" button. A de-merit button would be treated the same, with many users using it on posts they do not like or disagree with, rather than posts which are simply spam, zero value, etc. There is no doubt people would use de-merit against users who accuse them of something, give them red trust, or simply disagree with them. I also have no doubt that there would be merit circles who would conspire to heavily de-merit users they do not like.

Having such a set up essentially turns us in to an echo chamber like Reddit, where the most popular opinions are the most visible, regardless of whether or not they are actually correct.

We already have (multiple) rules against this sort of behavior from BADecker. We just need to actually enforce them.

Couldn't have said it better myself, I understand the reason why de-merit could possibly be a solution, however, it won't be treated correctly, which is entirely understandable for the reasons o_e_l_e_o mentioned. On top of that, it could potentially be abused from higher tier members to lower ranked ones that may not like or agree with, resulting in a bullying situation, something we're certainly not striving for.

My two cents, moderate sections with controversial subjects, such as Politics & Society, handle any reports made fair and rightfully, without taking advantage of the moderator position (another user already volunteered to do it), encourage more self-moderated threads to avoid BADeckers, as an effort for thread creators to avoid spam and shitposting, not to enforce their opinion. It's totally fine by me to have an opposite opinion about Covid-19 or anything else, however, I can show numerous examples of BADecker and a few other users who share similar characteristics with him, trashing my threads.

This sums it up perfectly.
And I think that the only reason he didn't get banned yet is because a huge lot of high rank users simply ignore the entire P&S section (imho this is a very important missing point in the Poll too), allowing that user fly under the radar.

That means that the staff are checking the reports, they just don't agree with your point of view. They only agree when you report posts to be merged, but not not the off-topic cases. I didn't pay too much attention to what he wrote about Russia's occupation of Ukraine because I couldn't care less what he thinks about it. But it seems the staff don't mind it, for whatever reason. But that plagiarism that o_e_l_e_o found definitely needs to be addressed. 

I have to say that P&S section is part of my ignore list so I don't see most of BADecker posts, and this board is probably with low radar inspection from forum moderators.
You can always ignore only BADecker account if you don't like his off-topic posts, but I guess every place have one of those weirdoes  :D
Funny thing about him is that he is doing everything for free, so he obviously have a lot of free time and motivation for this.
I wouldn't ban him if I was moderator even if I don't like his action, and he probably has few altaccounts that would continue to do something similar in future, maybe even harder then before.

This has been going on for years. BADecker would always take the most absurd position on almost every topic (except he was not a flat earther, go figure), which is not a bad thing in itself. However it doesn't mean he should have free reign derailing every thread. He also tends to create needless new threads when similar topics already exist; it's low level copypasta-but-with-links-so-technically-not-plagiarism garbage and he's basically doing this to bypass the multipost rule.

I think mods' indifference is caused by their lack of engagement, lack of feeling for the flow of discussion and disruptions thereof. That's why I think that a person from outside who is not actually invested in keeping P&S clean and usable (not just for copypasta trolls) would not do well as a moderator there, and that's basically what we're seeing now. That's why FH was a good choice for a moderator regardless of his political views.


He did and P&S was a much more adequate board under his supervision. I've had some discussions with him on the subject of moderation as well, and I liked his reasoning even if I disagreed with him.

Isn't he just trolling?

Sometimes, likely, may not be his main intent though as he seems to genuinely believe at least some of the stuff he's posting. He gets trolled a lot too when  others lose patience with him.

In any case, as long as it's not disruptive to the discussion, I wouldn't particularly care how the opinion is expressed.

It's shame that user like BADecker is No. 2 most posts made user on Bitcointalk. He derails almost every topic in P & S board, but he haven't done enough to get banned. His posts is usually nonsense shit, but often he post on topic, even if it's completegarbage.
Now I can't remember what situation on that board was when it had dedicated mod. Was it better?

I've been wondering did he ever made post about Bitcoin and yes, he did. But I think it's good that he stick with Politics and society board and not posting nonsense in other boards. And yeah, it's interesting for me too what is purpose of this smiley in his every post.