I think it is time to lock this thread so it won’t be quite as obvious when theymos does his April fools prank and so it will be more fun.

I think the standard to remove sent trust from 'Nuked' users should be much lower than for most other users. I don't think this should be automatic though.

My concern is there may be a situation in which a newbie is scammed, and the scammer is able to trick a mod into nuking the newbie. If sent trust is automatically removed, then the scammer will have been able to remove all public evidence of the scam, and will probably not be held accountable unless the victim creates a new account complaining. If someone has a bunch of untrusted feedback from people alleging a scam from people who were nuked shortly after sending the trust, this should be a red flag.   

All the evidence IMO points to corruption. The FBI is apparently investigating the circumstances surrounding the charges being dropped, although Kim Fox, the State Attorney in Chicago would likely be the one in hot water legally if the dropping of the charges was not above board.

The Chicago Police released the investigative report on their investigation, which gives more insight on how much evidence there is against Smollett.

When Smollett was initially charged, the police laid out the case against Smollett in a press conference, which was unusual, IMO. I am thinking the police may have thought that Kim Foxx might have tried to do something like this when they did this.

On Monday, Democratic speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, who is the leader of the Democratic party, said:
You can see a video of her saying this here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB86nP-jPDU&feature=youtu.be&t=105

On Tuesday, CNN discussed healthcare every hour during their primetime shows, from 7 PM until midnight. On Wednesday (tonight), CNN discussed healthcare every hour (on each of their shows), starting their morning lineup. 

In light of the above, one would have to ask why CNN would suddenly focus on healthcare so soon after the leader of the Democratic party says she wants the media to focus on healthcare if they were not acting on behalf of the Democratic party.

In fairness, there is a court case in which several states are suing, alleging Obama Care is unconstitutional because the penalty is not being enforced, meaning the individual mandate compelling people to purchase something, however this case is currently in the Appellate court, who is far from issuing a decision, and a Supreme Court ruling Obama Care potentially unconstitutional is many months, if not a year+ away.

Is there any way to reconcile the above that does not involve CNN being propaganda and/or what is essentially state run media similar to what is broadcast in North Korea or China?

From the forum administration's perspective, I don't believe it will be viewed these people are breaking any rules, as I am willing to bet they do not appear to be the same person when looking at their IP information and/or browser fingerprints (even though they are clearly doing harm).

IIRC, some people claimed to be in telegram groups in which someone would tell people which threads to post in and would receive payment for doing so, when there was an *actual* sting operation of someone pretending on purchasing the services of these people.

With both gambling and porn, there is an argument that both are harmful and unethical in various ways. I don't subscribe to the logic in making these arguments, however I do not find these arguments to be outright frivolous.

In addition to the suggestions of many above to make sure the signatures are not explicit, and to consider not linking directly to explicit material, I would suggest doing due diligence on the site itself. I would want to have confidence the site is not going to be spreading malware when visitors visit the site, nor when visitors try to download content, and does not have an excess amount of advertisements.

I do find it somewhat strange that a porn site would want to advertise here. I would not find bitcointalk the most effective venue to advertise on for this kind of business.

I am assuming Yatsan is the person you suspect is abusing merit.

I am not sure if he received merit from his alt account, or if he purchased the merit, perhaps from this guy. I looked through his merit history, and I am not quite sure what to make of it. He has received merit from a number of people that I don't think are selling merit, although this is based on their reputation from my perspective, and I did not look at their merit history. Most of the merit he received is from his various WTS threads.

I noticed he also received merit from Distinctin for a post that I do not believes deserves merit on a reasonable basis. Going down the rabbit hole, I looked at Distinctin's merit history, looked at the last 8 posts he sent merit to, and believe at most one of these posts reasonably deserves merit, and most are the only post on the page/thread with merit.

Back to Yatsan, on Feb 19, he received 2 merit from Distinctin (for a questionable post -- see above), and the next day he applies for a campaign (run by Hhampuz) with merit requirements, although only 10 merit were required, which he already met (the recent merit could have helped his application as it would have implied he made good post(s) recently).

I think there is at least a 60% chance Distinctin is either selling merit or giving merit to his alts (I think the former is more likely), and at least a 51% chance Yatsan recently purchased merit. Assuming Distinctin is selling merit, everyone he sent merit to did not necessarily purchase merit because there may be some false flags. Obviously both 60% and 51% is far from certain, and I would not say any of the above proves anything.

That was to reverse the effects of a merit source sending merit for reasons theymos disagreed with.

It was allegedly done to bypass an arbitrary rule, and I do not like arbitrary rules. There are many posts that are not objectively "high quality" (the intended purpose of the merit system) that receive merit. Campaign managers should stop being lazy and should review post quality of their applicants themselves.

While one might conclude this was 'abuse' based on the information in the OP, I don't think this is proven.

I am really not looking for translations of other threads, and prefer original content.

Bitcointalk URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=358020
Curent post count (Including this post): 13213
Amount of EARNED merit in the last 120 days: 120+ (not sure exact number)
BTC Address: 3PjXm2XYDKLV5mN3oiKzNTyVvSkqP3ujeq
*legitimate* negative trust received: none

Who are you referring to?

At the end of the day, there isn't really anything you can do. Officially, "merit abuse" is not against the rules. You can decide to ban the person from any of your campaigns if you wish, although I would first ensure their post quality is reflective of what you do not want in your campaigns.

You cannot blindly use merit as a basis for judging who to accept in your campaigns. There are a lot of people who have little merit who are very good posters, and there are people who receive a lot of merit from low effort posts. I would suggest having lower merit requirements than what you might otherwise want, and as a supplement to merit requirements, you can review their post history to ensure they have sufficiently good post quality, or you can ask applicants to present examples of posts that demonstrate their understanding of one of several topics posted at least several weeks ago.

The solution is to change how ANN threads are bumped to the top of the board.

Perhaps posts by those who are not the OP can be ignored when determining thread ordering. To go a step further, the OP could designate one post per day that will “bump” the thread to the top of the board.

This should entirely remove the incentive to use fake/paid bumps.

It looks like 2double0 is going to be late repaying the loan, after allegedly obtaining an extension from the lender.

Perhaps theymos could make a presentation that features a picture of President Reagan firing a machine gun while sitting on the back of a dinosaur with a rocket launcher strapped to his back with a tattered American flag in the background.

Similar to how Senator Mike Lee did durring a speech on the Senate floor today. 

I won’t give merit to legendary accounts. They don’t need any to rank up further.

You can delete my post once you add my thread to the OP

Perhaps the number of people who have sent merit to a profile can be taken into consideration in calculating their scores.

He has the intelligence of a monkey. Go back and look at his story and remember that he actually thought others would believe him.

I cannot imagine him having information that could possibly be useful and if he does, I cannot imagine him being able to document the information so that it would actually be useful (no sane prosecutor is going to base their case on his word).

My suspicion is Michelle Obama got involved.

Democrats and the media were largely staking their credibility on the Mueller report and after everything is said and done they won’t have much credibility left.

I suspect there will be a large republican majority in the house in 2020, I am not sure what the senate election map looks like and Trump will probably win by a large margin.

It looks like he will essentially get off with what works out to be a $100k fine and some community service but won’t have to plead guilty.

Excuse me while I check my white privilege.

Your posts are not four weeks apart, and I generally want posts at least this far apart so I can see that you have a history of making useful posts. I sent you merit because I believe your post history is especially strong.

Thanks.