I would probably question the credibility of your site, given that you added BTC-E without even reading this thread. You may want to reread, especially this part

True, the OP could be edited as well (I think?), but I personally wouldn't bother with someone who made a single post updating their thread saying that they are banned, with no additional intention of "bumping" their thread or whatever.

Not to take this thread off topic of why you were banned, but I'd agree with Quickseller there, and tell you that you are allowed to update your customers in your own thread, and say that you are banned for 30 days and cannot respond via the forum. That is one post though, "I'm banned, for bump spamming, and cannot respond here for 30 days or until my ban is lifted, please contact me via xxxx if we have pending business" Further discussion wouldn't be allowed as ban evasion though.

So I received my chocolates today, and I will say I'm very impressed. I'd consider myself a borderline foodie. I try and go after unique and tasty things that you can't typically find easily. I have scorned chocolates in the US for a long time, because its all produced cheaply and at low quality, as thats what the majority of people are willing to buy.

 

The packaging was well done, bubble wrapped thoroughly. One bar was a little bit broken, but its not really a big deal. Opening the box, an intense chocolate smell wafted out. The bars are packaged in plastic, then paper, and foil, but you can still smell the chocolate very easily through the packaging.

I haven't busted into all of the bars, but I can give some impressions based on what I had. The first thing I opened up was the Chocolate Paria Chaquaracual 70% bar. The 92 Gram bars come pre-scored with 24 sections (~3.8 grams/section). I popped a piece into my mouth, and waited for it to melt, but it didn't. Thats when I remembered, unlike Hershey bars and other junk chocolate made with high milk fat and oils, good quality chocolate doesn't melt at body temperature. Throw an m&m in your hand, and see how long it takes to become a sticky mess to compare. The three ingredients in the Chocolate Paria 60/70% bars are cacao, sugar, and chocolate liquore. No milk or fillers so they are gluten free/vegan as well for anyone who cares. The taste starts off subtle, but when you bite into it, it becomes very pleasant and smooth. What impressed me the most was how nice the after taste was, and how long it lasted. I kind of got a nutty vibe from it, but I'm assuming thats just what cacao tastes like in bean form. Simple but tasty.

The Chocolates el Rey are in a similar boat but slightly different. They come as a mix of 32, 5 gram squares in 73.5%, 70%, and 61% cacao. They are all individually packaged as seen in the photo. The ingredients are Cacao, chocolate liquore, sugar, soy lecithin, and Vanilla, so again gluten free/vegan. The chocolates el Rey are a bit smoother and sweeter than the Chocolate Paria, I'd assume due to the additional ingredients. The taste is a bit stronger, and again very pleasant.

I was comparing the 70% Chocolate Paria and the 73.5% Chocolates el Rey. As I said, I haven't tried everything yet, but the main difference I would say between them, is the level of processing. If you want something that is simple and tastes as close to natural chocolate as possible, the chocolate Paria is what you are looking for. If you want something that is a really tasty chocolate bar as you probably think of chocolate bars, the Chocolates el Rey I think are a better fit. Overall, at $5/bar including shipping, you aren't paying much more than you would for a junky Godiva bar of similar size in a grocery store. I'll definitely be ordering again.

I typically don't bother touching milk chocolate, but for my next order, I think I'll try the rest of what you are offering.

*I didn't receive a vouch sample of the chocolate, I was a full paying customer who wanted to get some tasty chocolate as a holiday gift, and was happy enough with it to leave my wall of text review to help anyone else wondering if its worth getting.


*edit*

After sharing with those who I intended to give the chocolate to as gifts, we have all realized something that I think is really important to mention here. The chocolate is high quality as advertised and known from the brand, however there is a major difference between this and say Swiss chocolate. If you want to taste the most decadent melt in your mouth eye rolling chocolate, this isn't it. You are after Swiss chocolate. If you want to taste old world style cacao and nothing fancy, this is what you are looking for.

Yeah, filling in the blanks a bit more helped. As I stated in my previous post, a person asking seriously for advice or info in the technical help section typically doesn't want jokes, they want information. I'm not surprised in the slightest that your post was removed. That doesn't mean I don't find it comical, but typically the most annoying thing when you are looking for answers is a sarcastic answer.

Sarcasm, humor, and such can be effective tools for furthering an argument or making a point. This a very clear case of your post being disruptive and even annoying, even if you didn't intend it to be.

*edit* Achow beat me to it


The only part I want to mention is about the paid signature part. It doesn't automatically make you guilty, but a lot of people will make reports when they see someone spamming with a signature advertisement. Its like driving a red car, it doesn't necessarily mean you will speed, but it catches people's attention more quickly when you do.

There are a lot of factors in play when deciding to delete a post. It depends a lot on the thread type, the section, whether the poster has a history of off topic or low quality posts, amongst other things.

When I see an off topic post, I first look at the thread type and what section its in. If its in technical help or scam accusations or something along those lines, off topic posts are far more detrimental to the thread and discussion than if it was posted in off topic, a general discussion section, etc. If I have deleted 5 other posts by that user today, I'm also far less merciful.

The biggest factor in deleting a non offensive off topic post is its potential for dragging the thread off topic. A minor off topic comment that doesnt invite an internal dialog in someone else's thread isn't a huge deal. If its open for discussion and the next 10 posters are going to reply to your off topic comment rather than discuss the purpose of the thread, it will likely be removed before that can happen.

The OP of a thread has a bit of say what is allowed or not allowed in their thread. If a few off topic jokes don't bother them, as long as they aren't going to completely change the purpose of the thread as I just explained, they probably wont be touched. That's not to say that an OP can say, Ok guys! This is my spam thread, want to get your post counts up? Come discuss here! There are no rules!

There is oversight by Theymos about moderator actions. Back when I was the moderator of the Alt Coin section, during the emergence of DOGE, I was obscenely busy keeping the memespouting too the mooners from flooding the whole section. I got PMs from Theymos saying, I just saw you deleted 36 posts, can you explain? If I didn't have a good explanation, I wouldn't be a moderator today.

There are a few reasons why scams are not moderated. The first being, what is and isn't a scam is up to personal interpretation. With the exception of the very obvious cases, what I might consider a scam could be different from what another moderator considers a scam. When regulating business, you need to have a unified definition of what is and isn't allowed, and thats not something we could do. There is also a potential for abuse. Moderators aren't given many privileges that they can abuse. If a rogue moderator went bad, they could probably delete some posts and annoy someone, but an Admin would see it very quickly, restore the posts, and remove the moderator. We can't see any of your personal info, and have no access to anything that could be of any liability to our users.

So why aren't those obvious no brainer scams taken care of? Because if we remove the obvious ones, then people will complain when we don't catch the non obvious ones. By not moderating scams, people are told to look out for themselves and not rely on moderators to keep their BTC safe. The really obvious scams are actually pretty useful in training people what to look for in harder to detect scams as well, so lets thank the terrible scammers! If we were to remove a scammer's thread, we would just be hiding the evidence they left themselves.

Illegal goods are not allowed here. Obviously, members here are from all over the world, so what is and isn't illegal depends on their country of residence. You are allowed to trade goods that are legal in your country with members who's countries have similar rules, with a few minor exceptions. We don't allow drug sales, pornography of minors, or things that are illegal world wide, like hacked/stolen accounts. We have had cases where someone wanted to sell drugs in a country that allowed it, and nude photos that were legal in their country of origin, but we had to say no to those because there is way too much room for problems there.

Moderators do not care about individual company's Terms Of Service. For example, if you play some online MMORPG and they say you can't sell items from the game for real money, we have no obligation to uphold their TOS. Likewise, selling accounts and other things that the service provider frowns upon is allowed here. That is entirely on you, if you get banned or whatever thats on the users breaking the TOS.

The speaking patterns are what I noticed change. The feedback left says "I sent the BTC first, sell me some alts" I went back through JW's post history and there are no other instances of incorrect verb tenses. This leads me to believe whoever left the feedback, english is not their first language, and I'm quite sure that is not the case for JW.

Given that I've traded with them in the past, and there is a reasonable amount of evidence, I've excluded them from DT. Of course that is without prejudice, and I'll promptly remove that exclusion if JW has any proof that their account hasn't been hacked/sold. I've also PMed them to direct them to this thread.

There have been and are sites like Ebay for Bitcoin. I used to use Bitmit, but I think they actually got bought out by Ebay. Shame because it was a pretty good site. Theres also Bitify right now. I find that the problem though is due to the nature of Bitcoin and a certain niche it attracts, Bitify is a scam hole. I've made maybe 5 purchases and 3 of which were scams. Their support isn't too bad, so I didn't lose anything, but I'm sure because of the amount of scams they are severely understaffed. I had something like 1-2 week resolution times with support.

The biggest issue I'd imagine, is to be feasible, they would need Ebay like fees. Most Bitcoiners use Bitcoin because of the lack of fees involved, and may not be too thrilled to pay the 10% needed to get decent customer service, and staff that can dissuade scam attempts. While Ebay has plenty of scammers, Ebay has enough resources to take the hit themselves if need be, or take legal action to actually go after people. I don't think Bitcoin Ebay would have that sort of luxury, so if anything, they would need to increase fees to cover unavoidable losses.

I've bolded the two main sections of my response here, you can skip to the response, but the Defining some Terms sections will make my response make more sense if you aren't completely understanding of the difference between Feedback and Trust. There is a TLDR at the end.

Defining of some Terms

I think its easier to understand if we use a slightly different terminology, so I'll be doing so in my explanation here. I'll start off by defining a few things. The system as a whole I will continue to call the Trust System. I will refer to comments left by someone through the Trust System as Feedback. There are two parts to the Trust System. There is Feedback and Trust. Feedback as I just defined, is the comments you leave on someone else's trust page. Trust, is when you decide you value someone's opinion as an extension of your own, and add them to your trust list.

Feedback is what most people are talking about when talking about the Trust System. It is exactly as many people have said, it is your personal opinion. Default trust starts at branch 0, these are people who Theymos have personally added to start the branches of the trust system. They were picked based on years of showing good judgement on related matters. When one of those people sees another user who's opinion they trust; someone they believe will leave accurate feedback for others, they are added to that user's Trust List. That is the difference between Trust and Feedback. Trusting someone is in a sense giving another user an extension to speak for you when they give someone feedback.

Trust is more strictly watched over by members of the Default Trust group. If I Trust someone who is making bad calls when leaving feedback, that means I am giving them license to poorly represent me. On the other hand, the feedback they leave for others is representative of their own personal beliefs. If I don't agree with their personal beliefs, I wouldn't trust them.


Now that that wall of text explanation defining the difference between Trust and Feedback is done, I'll move onto responding to your post quoted above. I bolded the points that I'm addressing.

Response to quote

1) As I just mentioned, your "Trust Rating" - Feedback should always be your opinion. Whether or not people agree with your opinion decides whether or not people choose to take your rating seriously, or disregard it as worthless. If you gave someone negative feedback for being German, anyone who disagreed would disregard your feedback. If someone on Default Trust was leaving feedback because someone was German, they most likely wouldn't stay on the list long, because that is generally viewed as a poor indicator of trustworthiness. To expand, if I Trusted someone who left Feedback because someone was German, I would stop Trusting them, as that isn't my personal view.

2) Staff members have no real impact on trust. Trust isn't moderated, and staff member feedback isn't more heavily weighted than anyone else's.

The reason the Trust System is set up like it is, is because its far more flexible to have all of the rules set by the community. What is acceptable to leave positive/negative feedback for is constantly being discussed, and changed as situations change. For example, at the start of the trust system, it wasn't necessarily common that people involved in Ponzis would get negative trust. As the community opinion has changed, that has become a more prominent thing. Morals are constantly changing. What is acceptable and not in a community changes very quickly with an evolving technology at its center. In a week, there might be a new thing that no one had ever heard of that needs a judgement. A few years ago, if you said mining to someone, they wouldn't know what you are talking about. A few years later, cloud mining became an entirely different thing. Next we are going to have atmosphere mining, and a new trust ruling will need to be made for that.

The Trust System is without rules, so that eventually the system can branch out into something that approaches decentralization (for a lack of a better term, though decentralization isn't quite right). Right now Default Trust layer 0, 1, 2, and 3 are most prominent. In time, branches 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 etc will be far more widespread, and to the point where the people on layer 0, 1, 2 etc can relax and let branches 6, 7, and 8 regulate themselves. Lets say there are 5 people on layer 0. Each picks 5 people to represent them. 25 people on layer 1, they each pick 5 people to represent them, so on and so on. By layer 5, we have 15625 people enforcing the community set rules. If someone on layer 5 abuses the system, the person on layer 4 deals with it. So instead of having 5 people setting the rules, we have thousands who can represent Bitcointalk's community.


Sorry that was such a long read: TLDR;

1) Feedback is not the same as trust, feedback is one's own opinion, trust is an extension of one person trusting the feedback of another user and allowing them to speak for that person.

2) "Trust ratings" - Feedback is always opinions, if you don't like someone's opinions, disregard it.

3) Trust and Feedback aren't moderated by the Staff here, Staff opinion's are exactly the same weight as other users.

4) The "rules" of the Trust System are set by community opinion. There are no official rules set by Theymos so its easier to adapt to new things. Theymos' personal opinions also mean less this way.

5) The trust system branches out so those at the center at Default Trust depth 0,1,2, etc become less important. They just need to find people that they would like to represent their opinions. Then the thousands of members at branch 5, 6, 7, 8 will be more in charge of distributing feedback that people can use as a baseline of trustworthiness.

Agreed completely. Come now, this is really getting old. Whether you are an alt of girlbtc, or someone hired by girlbtc, they broke the rules and are no longer welcome here. It would stand to reason that if they are paying you to post for them to plug the same stuff that got them banned in the first place, you will also be banned.

Something I've been noticing a lot about the whole girlbtc situation, is that all parties involved completely misunderstand what it means to ban evade and what the meta section is for. Ban evasion is posting when any of your accounts are currently banned. The one exception to this is limited access to posting in meta regarding your ban/rule clarification or something of the like. It does not mean that you are still allowed to spam, but only in meta.

If your question was: I am girlbtc staff, girlbtc's account was banned, am I allowed to continue posting here on their behalf? That would be a valid Meta thread, you would receive your answer: No, and that would be it. It is not an invitation to continue posting links and advertising the same annoying junk that got girlbtc banned in the first place. There are far too many links and side discussions in this thread to be considered simple rule clarification.

Woah, thats great news. Funny enough, I bought one of those coins probably 6-8 months ago as a joke, back when no one thought Trump had the slightest possibility of winning. I thought it was funny, and I had to hit a threshold to get free shipping on an order. The premium on the Trump coin brought me right to the limit.

These aren't silver. They aren't necessarily silver plated either. Silver bullion will have a legal hallmark on it that states the purity and weight. If it doesn't say .999, 999, or fine silver on it, it isn't silver. (there are also some other uncommon similar terms to the same effect ie feinsilber, etc)

It doesn't have a silver hallmark and it doesn't say any weight on it. Its just a commemorative coin made of some metal.

There is no issue with cross site promotion. If you know some people selling things on Ebay that will accept BTC, you are welcome to advertise for them. How you earn commissions is of no business of mine, as long as you follow the rest of the forum rules.

If they aren't accepting Bitcoin however, that is against the local rules of the BTCTalk Marketplace sections. Be certain they are willing to accept BTC before posting, otherwise your threads will be moved to the trash. If you have any threads up where the person selling isn't accepting BTC, please remove them yourself before a moderator ends up doing so, as moderator actions count as warnings.

If someone is overbumping, they are typically warned. If they are making an effort to delete their posts and rebump as a workaround an established rule, that means they obviously know about the bumping rule and are knowingly breaking it. Warnings are set in place for those who don't know the rules, need a reminder, etc, not as a cushion for those who think they will be safe breaking the rules expecting a warning shot before the hammer.

Have you made an enemy of Malevolent, or any Global Moderators/Admins? In other words, what leads you to believe that there is more than meets the eye? You registered ~1 month ago, not sure if that qualifies as long enough to know when something isn't right. Anyway, I'd probably agree with Achow, just report any threads that you think are violating the rules.

As far as being singled out, there are a lot of account sales and egift card threads in the trashcan. You certainly aren't the only one. If you see others that should be deleted, report them.

I placed an order yesterday as well, just received a tracking number. Will update when the chocolate arrives.

Hmm thats strange, I went back as far as about two weeks and I'm not seeing it in the trashcan section. Even if it had been moved to the trashcan, you can still see if your thread has ended up in the trashcan section from a user's post history (not sure if thats a moderator only thing or not)



This is your duplicate thread that Achow mentioned in their first response as viewed from your post history, but the original isn't anywhere to be found. Even moderators can't "Delete" threads that have responses in the thread, they can if there has been no other posts in the thread though. Can't speak for whether or not admins have that ability or not. Either an admin deleted your thread, or something strange happened.


*Edit* yeah, regular members can't see posts that ended up in the trash can in a user's post history, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't find your original thread in your post history or the trashcan. Odd or an Admin?

I locked the thread. The topic was an appeal for a ban. Information was given as to why the ban was issued, and the appeal was denied, and the OP acknowledged their understanding. It is not a place for a banned member to announce a new service. Leaving the thread unlocked would have been a free pass to ban evade. Allowing banned users to post in the Meta section isn't a free pass to bring up whatever topics they would like. Its a rule exception so that those who have been banned can find reasonable answers to their questions. Though I do think that you are girlbtc, and this thread is also likely ban evasion, will request that an admin double check.