Yes, but it may take some time.  I appreciate the input--those are exactly the kinds of accounts I would suspect are bought/hacked, though I haven't looked at their posting history yet. 

It's not surprising they haven't ranked up higher than they did because of those gaps.

So you're taking the "blame other people" route, got it. 

What do you mean there is no author?  I don't know anything about the website you translated from, but it's obviously not your own work--somebody else wrote it, and you thought no one would notice if you translated something from Russian to English.  Does that about sum it up?  If you're using someone else's words, you have to cite the source.  That's the rule, and if you don't follow it, it's considered plagiarism.

Can we stop jumping through hoops for you now?

I do this on my own time and receive no compensation for doing it.  Why don't YOU look into who's paying for these morons to post?

In any case, it would be one hell of a task for a bounty manager to find every one of these bought accounts.  It took me about 20 minutes to compile enough evidence just to bust this one account, so I highly doubt a BM is going to go through all of his applicants checking for this stuff, even if he cared to do so.  Nor do I think it's their responsibility.  They want members who are going to post and I'll bet most BMs don't care whether the account has changed hands or not.  That's a battle that only some of us have chosen to fight.

I think stark_star means the Twitter and FB reports, which are basically sequestered to the bounty section of the forum--and I don't have any problem whatsoever with whatever gets posted there.  The issue is when the bounty hunters participate in the signature campaign part of a bounty, which means they have to write posts in English.  That's a language that isn't native to most bounty hunters, and the result is shitposting/spam in sections outside of the altcoin bounty section.

As far as the "copied phrase" goes, OP said it himself.  There's no statute of limitations on plagiarism, so if you get caught with an old post you have to take the same consequences as you would had you done the copy/pasting yesterday.

In your case, people are probably getting tired of spending their time looking for examples of plagiarism or spamming or whatever.  We've seen it so many times in Meta where the same "why I get ban?" question gets asked, and then someone wastes their time showing an example, and the response from the banned person is begging/excuses/bargaining/etc. 

You're also not supposed to be posting here.

That's the main point, IMO.  The forum is polluted because of account buyers like you who get access to high-ranked accounts in order to shitpost for bounties--and that's in addition to essentially buying the reputation and rank of the member who originally owned the account, which is undiluted dishonesty. 

You've had your account tagged by multiple members for a long time now.  Why are you suddenly begging for mercy (or forgiveness, as you call it) as if you were nailed to a cross?  I don't get it.  You've been here long enough to know that not only won't that work, but it'll likely get you even more red trust.

Are you on DT?  I have to ask, because if not, it sure as hell looks like you're doing your best to kiss ass and repeat sentiments that have taken a long time and a lot of experience with shitposters for senior members to develop.  If I'm mistaken, I apologize. 

Negative trust probably won't affect your ability to do translation work, so what's the problem?

Excellent, thank you for that additional info. 

I'm coming to suspect that a lot of the old accounts that you still see shitposting in sections like Bitcoin/Altcoin Discussion are bought or hacked--and I mean accounts registered before 2013 or so.  Writing typical nonsense bounty spam wasn't a thing way back then, but it became a huge thing around October 2017 for some reason.  Probably had to do with the spike in price or a mass hacking or selloff of accounts by someone who had a lot of old ones.  Who knows. 

All I know is that real members from back in the early days weren't the type who'd be spamming for bounties in 2019, so I'm going to continue to check them out as I find them.

I tagged it because it was sold or hacked.  The fact that another shitposter has a red tag is just a bonus.

Thank you for stating the obvious, and pardon me for now deleting your post.  I'm looking for people who disagree with my logic, not for validation of what I essentially just proved.  I think I'll just lock the thread now and open it back up if nebiki sends me a PM.

Separate thread for this, as I'm using it for a reference in the neg I'm going to give the member in question.

The efxtrader account was created in November 2014 and could obviously create posts in English that were quite eloquent, like this one:

efxtrader continued to post (in English) up until October 13, 2015, when he wrote this:

Then there's a huge gap, and when the account resumes posting on December 1, 2017 it is on the Indonesian local board with this:

He continues to post in Indonesian up until March 26, 2018, and after a gap of a few days he starts writing in English again on April 7, 2018--only this time, the quality of English has turned from eloquent into something that should look familiar to those of us who fight against shitposting:

...and so on to the present day.  Thus, I strongly believe this account changed hands at least once in 2017 and is therefore worthy of tagging.  This thread is just to serve as a reference as I said, and efxtrader is more than welcome to defend this accusation.  It's self-moderated to keep the trolls and other assorted useless individuals away.

As an aside, I often hear the complaint that there are a lot of high-ranked accounts that are shitposters and that newbies get picked on unfairly.  I'm on the lookout for high-ranked shitposters with old accounts, because I suspect that some of them have been bought or hacked and have quietly slipped back into the spam megathreads.

Edit:  Dammit, I forgot to make the thread self-moderated.  Oh well.

I kind of figured I'd be up there on the list with Foxpup.  No idea why he merits so many of my posts, but I rarely see many of his in the places I hang out.  He obviously reads Meta, but apparently doesn't post there much.  Then again, if I were to give him a lot of merits I'd for sure get accused of merit swapping, and some people already think the top merit earners and givers are only concerned with circulating it amongst themselves.

And man...Foxpup must have one hell of a sMerit allowance in order to give out as many as he does.  It's no wonder he's gotten stabbed multiple times on this list.

Just making a reference thread, because I'm going to give the account a neg for being bought.

Note that the account nebiki was registered in 2011 and started off posting in German:

but also made posts in English, which were structurally pretty good (except for capitalization):

He posted very sparsely throughout 2012-2013, with the last post in 2013 being this:

Then there was a huge gap in posting until this post in June 2017:

and the posts thereafter are on the Indonesian local board, like this one:
, and over time developed somewhat of a hard-on for huge quote pyramids until he starts to post in English in 2018:


Right now this member is a typical bounty shitposter dropping gems like these (notice lack of punctuation at the end of his sentences.  He appears to have made a new year's resolution to stop using periods on 12/31/18):

....and so on.  So there's no doubt in my mind that the account has been bought and is currently being used by a shitposting bounty hunter.  If anyone has any good arguments against this, I'm all ears.  

This thread is self-moderated to keep the spammers and trolls out (cryptohunter, etc.).

Yes, especially for 'challenged' folks like me who would have no idea how to create such a thing. 

Great ideas, OP.  I'm not sure how difficult it would be for Theymos to integrate these things into the forum software/code/whatever, but it sure would make it a hell of a lot easier for people to report stuff and might motivate more of them to do so.

Yes and yes, though I'm sure members who make it a habit of reporting posts would find out soon enough.  And Theymos does tend to announce even small changes to the forum, so I'm fairly certain he'd make it known if he decided to make changes to the reporting system.

That's a beautiful piece with a lot of history behind it (though I'm not really familiar with it personally).  The fact that it's gold is kind of secondary to the history IMO.  It could have been made out of copper and still be worth quite a bit in 2019.

This thread is turning into just another bitcoin vs. gold thread, of which there are many--and that comparison is one that shitposters have ready-made answers for.  I suggest locking it, but that's on OP.

In 1000 years?  Who knows what technology is going to be like, or if mankind is even going to exist.  I tend to agree with those who think bitcoin is going to be replaced by something better or will somehow end up extinct, just a part of tech history.  But unless we start finding gold on asteroids or other planets and it becomes far less rare, it'll still have a high value attached to it for many years to come.  There will also be numismatic value on top of the melt value as long as numismatists still exist in 1000 years.  Humanity likes rare things and probably always will--I'm pretty sure it's encoded into our DNA at this point. 

Live for today, that's my suggestion.  I'm not too concerned about the fate of either bitcoin or gold in the next millenium, honestly.

Do you have an alt account that got banned?  That might be the reason as well.  Most of your post history is just bounty stuff, and people don't get banned for that.  I have no doubt one of the forum detectives or a mod will show up to tell you exactly why you got banned, but my guess is still plagiarism.  Your PM would have said something different if it was for something other than spam or copy/pasting.

You mean when you weren't being paid?

Also, you didn't address the other part of why you could have gotten banned, which is the plagiarism--and I suspect that's the reason.  Hey Theymos, don't you think it's a good idea to include an example of a banned member's copy/paste along with the ban PM?  I've suggested it quite a few times, and here we are still getting the same questions and wasting people's time looking for examples.

If this ban is actually for spam, then my bad.  But the idea is still worth considering.

There's no official (or unofficial) statute of limitations on plagiarism here.  If you did it at some point in your past and someone catches it and reports it, you suffer the consequences like everyone else.

From this point onwards, which is the reason I used the word "henceforth".  Again, I'm speaking only for myself.  If anyone feels differently about this and wants to aggressively pursue older examples of account sellers that didn't get tagged, they're free to do so.  I think it'd be a waste of time and energy, though.

OK, the feedback left by Lauda and actmyname speaks louder than the discussion we've had here--henceforth, no exceptions to account sellers being negged will be made.  I'm not in total agreement with that, but I do understand the need for consistency and avoiding even the appearance of not playing favorites--even though I have no relationship with grtthegreat and didn't stand to gain or lose anything if I negged him.  My problem is that I can see both sides of the argument, and each side has valid points.  That's why I'm conflicted.

However, if this is the community standard that we're going to adopt I can live with that.  No one should be selling accounts in 2019 and should know that buyers & sellers of them have been getting tagged since 2016 and should be familiar with all the reasons that have been given as to why account sales hurt the forum.

My apologies for waffling on this, and I'm glad marlboroza made this thread so that we can all give our opinions.  I, for one, am thankful for everyone who chimed in.

Pretty sure nobody is saying that, and if they are they're mistaken. 

Theymos's quote is still partially correct.  Seems like few people actually read stuff in Meta; a lot of members just post here in hopes of earning merits or getting in the good graces of DT members--and I'm not talking about the Meta regulars but typically "unknown" users who stop by to offer "helpful suggestions" about issues that have already been discussed ad nauseum.  Also notice that when we had the 1-merit requirement for ranking up Newbie accounts implemented, we had multiple members complaining in Meta that they wished there had been a discussion about the decision beforehand and that they were taken completely by surprise when the change went into effect.

Meanwhile, that particular issue had indeed been debated for months before Theymos actually did anything.  If the newly-busted Newbies had been reading Meta, they would have not only known that it might be coming but could have given their input. 

The posting-for-merits has died down considerably in Meta since September, and for that I'm grateful--except now those garbage posters have been replaced by genuinely quality posters who are at war with one another about the trust system, and there's also been a spike in trolling.  This does make for some excellent reading and provides a good dose of entertainment (except for the trolling, which isn't done well), so all in all I'd concur with OgNasty that times have certainly changed in this particular section since 2014 and before.  I wasn't around until 2015, but even then I don't remember Meta being this active.

I think you mean the pizza buyer, and that's the first thing I thought of when I read OP's (very poorly-written) post.

I'd only buy a car with cash, and only a used one.  Buying new cars is only for people who have enough money to not care about how much a vehicle depreciates once it rolls off the lot, and I'm not--and never have been--one of those fortunate folks. 

Exactly.  Some people really love cars, and I can understand that but it's definitely not my thing.  I suppose if I absolutely had to buy a car and only had bitcoin, I'd do it.  Otherwise, as I've always said I view bitcoin more as an investment than a currency.  I would hate to be that guy who bought the pizza for 10,000BTC looking back at the purchase 10 years later.  Ugh.

Just playing devil's advocate here, but if you looked at how many times I've sent bitcoin to one of gameristo's wallets you might suspect we're alt accounts--but we're not.  I wouldn't discount the possibility that a lot of deals are being done off-forum, and I've been tricked by that before when tagging bounty abusers.  On the other hand, when you've got merit-swapping happening on top of the money being sent, that might be more conclusive as to whether two (or more) accounts are alts--but even then, they could be friends or family and not a single individual.

I don't think it's right to give merit to someone just because they're your friend or family member, but I wouldn't tag a person for doing that.  If you've got someone in a bounty/campaign who's doing it and you're the manager, you might think twice about letting those accounts participate.  We've all seen cases of bounty abuse and we know it happens.  What you do depends on how much you're willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.