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After being banned last Monday, this is now my ban appeal for user tyz. No matter what the final decision is, I would appreciate an answer from a mod.
First of all, I sent a ban appeal to the email address mentioned in the ban message four days ago (in this email, I assumed - as I know today - the wrong cause for the ban). Unfortunately I haven't gotten an answer yet. At least it would be desirable to get a short answer (even if it would be only "accepted" or "not accepted"), otherwise you should simply remove the email address and refer to the meta forum for ban appeals. This could save both sides a lot of time and work.
But now to the actual subject.
The ban came along with a deleted post (from November 2017) of me. So I'm assuming that the ban applies to this post and plagarism.
Since the post has been deleted I did some research and found the article I allegedly "plagarized" from. I don't want to gloss it over, my post consisted out of third passage of the article. It would be presumptuous to say today why I posted exactly this text at that time (its more than 1,5 years ago). Very likely, I was an active for the project at this time and correctly shared some other information about it, not only on bitcointalk. The most obvious explanation is that I simply forgot the link to external source back then.
In the course of my long activity on Bitcointalk I have shared hundreds and hundreds of texts and information to stimulate and supplement discussions and I would claim that 99.9% of them were correctly linked or quoted, that at least one of them was rushing through me, is annoying, but certainly did not originate from intention. To sell this text as my own work would also be presumptuous, as I am not a native English speaker and it is clear that it was written in perfect English.
Since I myself have been a moderator of a larger forum in my native language for several years, I can follow the action of fighting plagarism and spam. I know it's an increasing problem and the quality of the Bitcointalk forum has fallen sharply since 2016 at the latest. I can understand if you want to stop annoying account farming. I also had to ban members, but we had a clear transparent warning system in which everyone could read his current status. A ban of nowhere, was only for really gross offenses (eg fraud, legal investigations, verbal and racist insults). Such a transparent warning system would also do Bitcointalk well. We are proud of the transparency that decentralized systems like Bitcoin give to us and the society, but in our innermost community this is not lived. That is a contradiction in terms.
A funny fact: I myself created a Bitcointalk crawler bot (original version goes back to 2016).
Through various own researches and orders I have collected meanwhile a database with over 600k posts. In order to avoid corrupt data from the bot, I roughly check the crawled data and have found many spam posts (including one word posts) during the last months and reported them to moderators (about 100+ with 100% accuracy). Also, there were a few cases of obvious plagiarized texts that I also reported (I remember only affecting Newbie and Junior accounts). As I said, those were only findings made by a rough check for possible false crawls of the bot. If I would have checked every single post more intensively, probably many more posts would have been problematic.
So why didn't I check my own posts (which are completely in the database) after the ban wave started two three weeks ago? For one simple reason, I was sure I hadn't plagiarized (deliberately)
In the past few days I have also implemented a Google search in my bot. I checked roughly whether a text (without citation or link) from my database also occurs in external sources and also in other Bitcointalk topics, and I must say my bot found some cases (I have to say that the Google search is a quick implementation for now, it needs further developments). Luck for some that report to moderator is deactivated for banned members as well
Furthermore I checked my contributions intensively and there were no further anomalies, which is why I assume that this was likely an isolated case.
To finanzlize my pleading I want to bring a few more points to the table:
- I have been a member of the forum for almost six years (end of 2013) and have spent 71 days of my life in the forum (according to statistics). That's more than I spent with my current girl friend
- I have reported 150+ posts with an accuracy of 100% to help avoid spam and (funnily enough) plagiarism
- I received 111 merits spread over many posts (some of them of top members like OgNasty, qwk, LoyceV...)
- According to Bpip.org my account is ranked 173th (most recognized), 175th (most active), 582th (most merited)
- I was a merit source and I've always tried to distribute my merits responsibly and fairly. According to the data from LoyceV I have been among the top 50 users in the forum for the past weeks and months who have distributed merits.
- I've never had a negative rating for gross or serious violation.
I'd welcome if the ban would be removed or transformed. If this should not be possible for whatever reason, then I would like to say goodbye after almost six years! It was nice and entertaining to be part of the community during the ups and downs of the crypto world.
Thanks for reading!
PS: Regardless of my ban case, several members (mainly from the German-speaking section) have been banned lately. I don't know the reasons in detail, but some of the users were an active part of a good discussion culture in the forum. I think that I'm not the only one who would miss these posts and would like to see the rules at least relaxed for longtime members. I support the following ideas of hilariousetc and 1miau.
Last but not least, before you focus your energy completely on plagiarism and spam, you might want to take a closer look to the "Accounts & Invites" section, or better, shut down it completely. In this section occurs more criminal activity than all plagiarists in the forum can do together
