Cyrus likely doesn't have the time for changing the account name, and I'm not sure if that's even done anymore. It would be better to just make an account than to contact cyrus as he's got more important responsibilities to take care of. If you want to be transparent and post your newly registered accounts username here, then I'm sure the community would appreciate that. I do find it hard to believe that the account username is so similar and you have no idea who he is.

What would be the solution to this though? Assuming there would have to be a compromise we would likely see this abused by the many and more bots would be registering and spamming the forum. Chinese members could just use a VPN to sign up, unless there's another alternative which is just as effective as keeping the bots away.

There's services which offer to write out the captcha and send it to the users registering, so any other system which doesn't use the image could easily be abused and automated.

Of course you have the right to do this, but if you are only posting one or two members then a copy and paste list probably isn't worth making. Instead, just report the posts using the "Report to moderator" button and include a reference to the other copy and they'll be dealt with by the moderators.

It would be unfair to ban them straight off the bat if they have only done it once, or possibly twice. But, any serial necro bumper is likely to be  trolling anyway. Deleting the necro is sufficient enough in most cases. I don't think it happens that regularly enough to make it a huge problem.

Obviously, keep on reporting them if they add nothing new to the discussion.

Your only option is creating another account that isn't almost identical to someone that's already in this community especially someone has trusted and renowned as DannyHamilton. That's your only option, it doesn't mean people will trust you even if you did that, but users aren't going to be removing the trust on this account your using now because of the potential to use Danny's name and trick people into thinking you are him.

Do you even report any posts here on the forum? No one is going to be made a moderator without contributing something to the forum. There's many users like Lutpin and Shorena which have been established members for years and have reported well over ten thousand posts without being made a moderator.

I'm not sure what you mean, but it's a bounty and doesn't seem to be offering any bonuses for posting in their thread and is posted in the bounty section, unless I'm missing something it seems to be fine. In future though, if you feel that a post is incorrectly posted for what ever reason use the "Report the moderator" button at the bottom right of the post.

The staff have nothing to do with red ratings or any ratings at all, at least directly. Yeah they can use the trust system like any other user, but moderation shouldn't be a thing when it comes to removing/editing trust ratings. The staff are responsible for acting upon reports and dealing with anything they find infringes the guidelines, and they do their best from what I can see. Several staff members are on 8+ hours a day and it's not even a well paid 'job'.

When such a diverse amount of people are commenting and sharing their opinions in one place, there's going to be arguments and disagreements. You'll never stop that, though I don't think this is affecting the punishment of shitposters and scammers.

Even if these guys were busy there's several other members that contribute to finding, and handling spammers, scammers and the like. Even non established members are calling out others for shady activities and  then a DefaultTrust member reviews the evidence provided and deals with it accordingly.

Your going to get disagreements, and I don't think it's affecting anything but, the public perception of those involved.

Bad posts receiving merit should be eliminated eventually when most non source members lose all their merits, and thus the spamming should subside. You'll still see spammers copy and pasting and what not to try and get merit, but hopefully it won't be as much as it was a month ago.

It's true not all good posts should get merited, but quality on topic posts which provide something new to the discussion should probably receive merit. It should be hard to rank up and thought and work needs to be put into it to rank up, but it shouldn't be impossible.

There's no need to apologize, in theory we want the system to recognize good quality posts, and hopefully we'll reach the point in the future where almost all constructive posts get merit but, at the moment that isn't happening. This doesn't mean the system is failing either, there just isn't enough sources to distribute merit. When there are more sources covering the forum and not overlapping each other we should see an improvement in quality posts getting merited and you would be correct that helpful posts would get merited then.

Bitcoin Talk Name: Welsh
Bitcoin Talk Profile: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=84521
Post Count (including this post): 3179
BTC Address: 12NfYxGMCKt4KtjucqHfjQ1KZj5sMU1qUt
ETH Address: 0xf17f7eEeE810116D1E1f349e2eab2eE1B63228B0

Have you not seen the amount of SMS services there are that offer like 1000 messages for below 1 dollar? There was one in this forum offering it in the services section. Implementing a SMS field on registration wouldn't solve anything.

Also, no one in the Bitcoin community would be willing to upload their Identification to the forum, for several reasons. The forums been compromised in the past which means the hackers would of had the ID of hundreds of thousands of users at the time, as well as users that use Bitcoin are normally quite security conscious and don't like to give their name let alone their whole identification.

Nice statistics here. I noticed while browsing the altcoin thread that actual worthy discussion almost always doesn't get merit, but the spam, announcement threads and the like are getting merits from what I would presume their alt accounts.

You shouldn't ask for merit, but even if a message is helpful it might not get merited currently. There currently isn't enough sources to distribute merits. theymos did suggest in the future there will be a few hundred sources though and that should more than cover all sections of the forum and more posts should then be merited.

I believe the staff actually recover accounts via different coins as long as they work the same way in signing and verifying the address. It would probably need to be a popular altcoin like ETH because they would already need the software to verify the message.

Just because a post hasn't been merited doesn't mean it's not relevant. Users which aren't sources are likely to be more hands off in handing out merits and will only give it to truly exceptional posts.  I agree that there should be an option for viewers of a thread to only see merited posts once we have a few hundred merit sources but, to delete unmerited posts would be unnecessary in my opinion.

I think reddit is a fine example why we should try not to use a demerit system. It would either have to be limited, possibly to merit sources only or a limited amount of demerits for all users based on some other factor.

It's quite obvious if you take a look at reddit that a lot of the responses get down votes just because some people don't agree with their point, it doesn't matter if it's constructive or not or brings up valid points it will get downvoted.

Not like it matters, referral links aren't allowed in most cases plus your post history is utter nonsense. Possibly already banned due to lack of a signature but, I'll report the remaining posts with referral links anyway.

Okay a bit delayed on the update due to the rugby last weekend, but I should have enough time later today to add a few more accounts. I've been checking the users throughout the week and should have at least another 10 users to add.

Updated, added 14 new users after finding a few duplicates in my original findings. I've still got a huge backlog, but it's very tedious to update.