Merit is suppose to highlight the good quality posters from the bad. Reporting posts isn't related to this. People reporting posts already get enough reward in that they are making the forum cleaner and I'm sure the moderators thank them from time to time. I mean if you want you could just go over to the stats that theymos presents now and again of the top reporters and send them merit on that.

I might be a weirdo but, there's something therapeutic about reporting posts and seeing them get dealt with.Then again I am a weirdo.

Bitcointalk Username: Welsh
Rank: Legendary
Merit: 1066
Current post count: 3340
BTC Address (SegWit): bc1q9va3tj3us6s8uuak7s6hcgj7e2wrm37m24y7rq

Creating a topic will likely further your learning also. Sometimes when your learning a complex subject you may get something wrong, and by creating a topic related to what you've just learned and going into detail will likely have mistakes, and the community can further highlight any mistakes you may have heard. I'm not saying to create a topic every time,  but it certainly helps further your knowledge at certain subjects.

Good job on proving that the system is working. It's refreshing to see someone eager to learn about Bitcoin and it's technology.

Password and email has been changed according to the trust page, but this isn't sufficient evidence and you need to do the same as everyone else and sign a message. Sign a message from an address that has been posted by the account and then we can tag it whilst the staff recover it.

The account has multiple trades throughout it's years here so there shouldn't be a problem with you recovering it from one of the addresses used.  

Unless, the password is very weak then the OP would have to know the majority of the password anyway. If he has no idea then it's likely to never yield any results unless the password can be attacked via a dictionary type attack or if the password is only a few characters long.

This information is also public. If they don't possess the capability of searching this up on their own then they likely don't have the knowledge to breach a password effectively without knowing the majority of it. 

Participating in bounties with two accounts isn't going to get you banned off the forum. Although, you would need to look into the bounties terms and conditions as they may not want people from the same IP/household participating. If you are found to be abusing bounties with multiple accounts you may receive a negative rating from users of the forum.

I think it's fair to assume that when an account is banned others which share a common IP will be looked at. Although, there's ways of telling whether someone is an alt account of another through various different methods. If the staff have only a common IP associated with each account then the other one will not be banned just because of that.  Looking at my first reply it probably needed to be explained a little more.  

I was initially referring to alt accounts because of the way the OP is phrased and the problem with using two accounts and one of them getting banned and you continue to use the other which the other account would then be banned for ban evasion.

No. It's allowed and you won't get banned. If one of the accounts get banned for what ever reason though expect the other one too as well.

Yeah, other sections have multiple moderators and if it was one section then I would think that Politics and Society would be the most in need of multiple moderators.

It's a shame that you are busy because as far as I remember you report a few posts and seem to quite enjoy the political discussions. Same goes for LoyceV as I think they have also shown a desire to improve the forum wherever they can.

A few members before you have been made a moderator at lower ranks. If I remember correctly rickbig wasn't considered a high rank but, reported posts in a timezone where things wasn't getting handled. You seem to be willing to put in the work, but Politics and Society is a little different than those over at the alt section as they do tend to be a little more complicated. Although, I don't see why theymos wouldn't at least consider you if you threw your hat in.

It's nice to see that there's going to be an attempt to reclaim that section, I've noticed a few politics related discussions going on within serious discussion and have quite enjoyed a few of them. I used to think it was a lack of moderation within the section, but it appears by these stats that there just isn't enough reports.
 
On to the list though. Here's my personal thoughts on the candidates:

Flying Hellfish speaks for himself in the most active reporter in the section although, judging by the other report figures there isn't a whole lot of competition. That's probably because people just gave up and moved on to other sections like serious discussion. I think it says a lot though that Flying Hellfish is still reporting even though the section is completely drowned out by spammers and has been for a very long time.

If it's true that he had almost 1k reports in a few days I think that shows that he's willing to put in the work even if they wasn't all correct. It's very easy to get dishearten when your accuracy is falling and there's no way to verify why unless you manually keep on checking if it's been removed via the modlog, and especially in Politics and Society due to the sheer amount of spam. Although, 257 good reports is still a very respectable number.

Foxpup reports quite a few posts outside of Politics and Society and if I remember correctly has a very good accuracy percentage too. So he obviously knows what to report and likely how to deal with it. He's also shown the desire to better the forum by contributing to it throughout the years he's been here:
Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3


Vod I think it goes without saying that Vod has dedicated his time in ridding the community with scammers and has used his analytical skills to do so. Even though scams aren't moderated if Vod could use these analytical skills for moderation of the junk I'm sure he would be a good match.

There isn't enough active reporters of that section to really pick and choose though and if you do become stuck then I would be willing to help out. But, I haven't really visited that section on a regular basis in a long time and whoever you pick I'll be sure to start contributing more to reporting in that section now that there's going to be a dedicated mod dealing with it.

Yeah at first glance looks to be guilty. I'll take a look more in depth later on, but this seems to be very popular scam right now and it's probably not too outrageous that some of these scam attempts are the same person. Just looking at the reputation section there's several of these types of scams going on.

We'll never truly see this die out completely, but I would think in a years time we'll only see a couple of people opening threads like this one. I don't think it's fair to assume that anyone who opens a topic about merit is looking to gain merits too. Sometimes change needs to happen and any suggestions to features of the forum are welcomed in my opinion. Although, it's obvious in most cases and this case isn't any different to the numerous other ones we've seen lately.

A great rule of thumb to go by which may be complete paranoia is if you think it could of been tampered with at anytime then you transfer everything as soon as possible and get a  non compromised device. It's extremely unlikely that your work colleagues possess the skills to compromise the device but, always assume that whoever had access to it physically could well compromise it.

Unless, you were registered before the 2015 database leak then it's likely your own fault that your account is being compromised to attacked.  Your either using a weak password or a password which you use elsewhere which may have been compromised. Check HaveIbeenpwned with your email to make sure that it hasn't been leaked, if so you need to change your password on everything you use it for.

It's good to regularly change passwords, but it's not something people often do.

Many people have tried to replicate what we have here because they didn't agree with certain ways things were handled, but none have ever been successful to my knowledge. I think the laid back approach to scams and the like actually help and encourage free speech and avoid the conspiracy theories that would come if peoples threads were deleted because it was an expected scam.

4 second cool down is pretty standard I still run into it from time to time, but I've changed my process to accommodate and to not hit the limit. I now only report one comment at a time, where as before I used to shift click on the report to moderator button on all the posts I wanted to report and then fill in the information and send them all off together or something along the lines of that although I can't quite remember the exact process. Now I shift click, fill in the information and then submit it and move onto the next. I only run into the 4 second cool down now and then by doing this.

I've actually asked this question in the past and it seems some moderators prefer you do it this way and then others prefer you report all the messages individually. I guess if you are running into cool down times it's beneficial to just report one and include a note that there's more.

How did you come by this amount of vouchers? Surely if you bought them from bitmain themselves you would of intended on purchasing something from them. It just doesn't make much sense to me why you would have as many as you do and also willing to take a loss from the overall value of the vouchers.

Follow the topic bitperson linked to the letter, and said it to either theymos or cryrus. Be warned though there's currently a huge backlog of accounts judging by all the threads in this section and you may be waiting a few months before hearing back. This is why you should make sure that you follow the instructions that have been linked to the letter to assure that you haven't made any mistakes. You can post the message here in this thread if you would like the public to verify the signed message.

AFAIK there's an option to have all reports within your jurisdiction sent to your email, but with the amount of reports that they have to deal with on a daily basis I doubt that many have this option enabled and wouldn't doubt it if theymos has already disabled it globally.

Otherwise, the reports are sent via a queue sort of interface.

Yes, that is true and I tend to know who's dealing with my reports when it comes to mprep and the global moderators. In fact I think I know the time zones of most of them by now.  

These threads ring some bells, but I can't remember exactly what was in the OP. Normally threads are scrapped if they are offering an incentive to post on their thread this could be on their website, twitter and isn't specific to the OP. So it actually pays off when reporting to check all of their social media accounts and websites to see if they are offering any bonuses and if they are that will save you and the mods dealing with a bunch of reports.  

Otherwise it tends to be just deleting the replies instead of trashing the thread due to what you mentioned with competitors potentially sabotaging each other.

It might be a small percentage of people but, certain members will make this mistake and they get harshly called out because of the widespread abuse by other members. It does happen and it's only ever annoying when they continue to do so. The first time their post will be deleted and hopefully a friendly mod let's them know why it's been deleted.

It's obviously abused by certain members, but we shouldn't assume that everyone that doesn't quote/link to original article is doing so on the attempt to pass it off themselves.