It might not be fair from your point of view, however upon signing up to the forum you are signing up to the rules of the forum. Therefore, to sell the sort of stuff that you were trying to sell you'll need to wait until you have more of a history here. Newbie members selling this sort of stuff gets deleted, and its not just you that has been subject to that. Many users per day get their "business" deleted, because its against the forums guidelines.

This would be very difficult for anyone to achieve unless they already have a big following. Besides that anyone who cares about the forum will see that the merit system is beneficial to the forum as a whole, and has only a few minor issues with it. There's been other forums that have branched out, and tried to compete with Bitcointalk, but consider the history of Bitcointalk, and how its generally run none of them are even close to what this forum is. theymos generally does a good job in allowing free speech, and not being bias towards users.

Moderators cannot issue temporary bans only admins, and global moderators have the ability to do that. Moderators don't even have the ability to issue a permanent ban other than the nuke option. Twitch streamers also have an agenda when "hiring" moderators in that they are either rewarding long term viewers, appointing friends, or giving an incentive for users to stick around, and watch them. I do agree that there's a few sections which require additional moderators, but I'm not sure whether there's enough reporting data in those sections in the right time zones etc.

I also do this, and I have a text document somewhere with a list of threads that needed merit when I didn't have any. You'll often see me revisiting threads, and posts that I have previously merited. Especially, since my merit allocation has increased, I believe previous posts I may have merited wasn't enough as I usually send around 5-10 merits now. I'd rather merit posts that have a tonne of merit which are of good quality than to have them waste away. I guess its a little different for merit sources though, and those who have sMerit can hoard it for a little longer than usual.

It's everyone's responsibility to know the basic rules before posting on the forum. However, what was your friend banned for exactly? If its posting in the wrong section, then they wouldn't be banned for that. If its a permanent ban I would wager that its for plagiarism.  

All your friend can do is email the email included in the ban message if there is one to appeal the account. That's the only possible way the account will be unbanned.

The trust system really isn't meant for dealing with spam or anything like that. You are not bothering the moderators by reporting, there's a reason we are moderators. We accepted the role, and therefore we expect to deal with reports. Also, we always appreciate those that do report, and it makes our job easier!

I would take LoyceV's advice of meriting posts that deserve it literally. I know its always nice to give the opportunity to users that are of low rank, but I don't take that into consideration when I send merit. I have no criteria whatsoever when it comes to activity, and rank. If suchmoon or LoyceV make yet another good post I'm going to send merit their way, because they don't deserve it any less than a newbie making their sort of posts. At the end of the day though its your merit, and you get to decide.

If you've had just launched the forum you aren't likely to have that many users signing up, and participating in discussion. You could probably manage any spam that comes your way yourself. I doubt that you would need to work 2 hours a day on this. Considering your pay for the month is lower than the minimum wage for an hour in most countries you are definitely not going to get someone who's worth their weight in moderating. 

I honestly wish it was a full time job of mine, but life gets in the way. I think I've grown attached to this forum over the years, and have some sort of passion for it. It's annoying to see spammers destroying what we've all worked so hard to achieve. Eventually, I can see it happening that signature campaigns will be removed for good, despite theymos being against the idea I think the spam problem as Bitcoin popularity grows will force his hand. It would be a tremendous shame that we would have to lose a sort of ecosystem within the forum because of that though. We could put warnings out to those that are spamming, about the long term implications they are having to their "career", but it would likely yield more negative results than positive.

This is the current downfall of the software. I also don't really like labeling everything with "AI" these days, and I'm not even sure if that's even at all possible. This software isn't learning, and is generating its content through spinning words by using a thesaurus, and generating words via its corpus rather than truly learning.  However, all this method really does from a spam point of view is look more constructive at a glance, however the closer you look you'll see that it is as you elegantly put "meaningless wordy diarrhea".

As I've mentioned from a spam point of view its not that good when you've got human moderators, and users looking at the response. However, from an anonymous point of view this is surprisingly effective at getting rid of linguistic habits that you might be conveying unintentionally.   

This is also used for avoiding detection via stylometry or better known as linguistic fingerprint. Truth is we all have unique ways of conveying our information, and its not different on this forum. Therefore,  we fall into patterns with the words we use, punctuation, and slang (and if you're TMAN the amount of times you say "fuck" in your replies). Right down to how often you quote someone, and how much you edit of said quote can be evaluated, and possibly gauged via a probability guess very much like GLTR guesses the next word.

The problem with stylometry is it can  be combated multiple ways, and the examples in the OP are ways that this can be done. However, most users including those using Tor browser usually do leave some sort of fingerprint behind, because they're not willing to change their habits every time they post or use automatically generated texts like the examples in the OP. Luckily, there are tools out there which capture the percentage of text which has been reused, and you can make an educated assumption that this post has been altered by one of the methods.

These posts despite looking very impressive to begin with are definitely noticeable, and have happened in the past. I believe hilariousandco has posted about this issue before, and a few users that were abusing these tools were dealt with. Despite their sophisticated appearance, they will be dealt with if these posts are reported. However, they do definitely take a lot more attention than the general spam.

As these tools get more sophisticated, and their corpora gets expanded we'll likely see more, and more of this being used.

Probably, but they leave a trace every time they sell merit at least, unlike account sales. Therefore, finding these serial merit sellers should be an easier task. There's been a few busted since the introduction of the merit system. AFAIK, considering the amount of users who have ranked up under the new system merit abuse isn't as big as originally thought to be.

You do run the risk of interpretation of the moderator who handles that report. For me, if new information has been given, and there's an interesting discussion to be had I personally don't mind necrobumps. However, most of the time its better to create a new thread. Not many users get reported for necrobumping with useful information to the thread.

If there's enough content to justify its own section, then this will likely happen. However, looking at the amount of trader journals there are on the forum it doesn't currently justify its own section. Of course, you could argue that creating a dedicated section would increase the amount of users creating these types of threads, but probably the best idea would be to create one thread where everyone contributes their trading journals for the time being.

It would only be in vain if the thread presents no new discussion. A lot of people don't like replying on older threads when the discussion is outdated, and because most substantial users here will read from the first page on wards to catch up with the discussion older threads can sometimes be problematic if that information is now outdated. For example, there's numerous threads over in the speculation section which are repeating topics from several years ago, but because of the ongoing nature of the value, and price of Bitcoin ongoing discussion is going to happen. Sure, we don't need several guides on how the trust system, because one guide is enough, but not everything is black, and white when repeating topics occur.

If that information is outdated, and you want to ask a more the current stance on the topic then that's usually fine. As long as its bringing some sort of constructive discussion, and not just repeating what has been said before its fine to have duplicate threads as long as they are fairly spread apart, and not ongoing discussion at the same time.

I'm not a fan of the proof of authentication posts, and believe there's other ways to automatically do this. Especially, with systems like Discord, and Telegram where they can setup automatic bots to determine whether a proof of authentication is formatted correctly, and acceptable. These could go in a dedicated channel which wouldn't be spammed to the public.

Although, I'm not a fan of allowing this sort of content on the forum it is allowed, unless they're offering an incentive to post them.

I'm probably overlooking the language barrier, because I haven't experienced that for obvious reasons. Trolling is a highly subjective subject most of the time, and as you know there's multiple factors that are considered when concerning trolling. My experience with ban evasion is its usually dealt with pretty swiftly, as long as there's undeniable proof.

Small micro bans might be a idea to implement, and could prove to be beneficial I guess. Possibly, only banning them from the local section, and not the entire forum.

Any local moderator or dedicated section moderator can request bans, and they are usually looked into, and issued within a few hours from my experience. Global moderators are generally more experienced in the art of moderation, and it makes sense that they issue bans on those who are more established here. So, your local section moderators should be able to request any bans that they want looked into.

I can't really comment on the workload of the admins, and global moderators, but considering the amount of time that it usually takes to get your requests looked at I don't think its too much of a issue, they just need to be requested. The only issue I see is that global moderators still have to take the word of local moderators when considering translation issues.

Although, proof of authentication posts here on the forum doesn't prevent users impersonating others any more than Google Forms. Email accounts are easy to create for google forms, and user registration here is easy too. As proven by the 100s of account farms which get uncovered now, and again which are abusing bounties.