I wonder if Tbbtyr Genafyngr speaks “Usenet old-timer”.  Now, I’ve recently been accused of being one to post cryptographic puzzles; and this well may be the easiest one there is:

Nyy unvy gur zrevg flfgrz, juvpu funyy fnir gur Ovgpbva Sbehz sebz fcnz naq genfu!

Gunax lbh, gurlzbf!

---

Hello.

Pleased to oblige.

Thanks for having brought this to my attention.

Negative trust feedback from nullius to #992943 “Danos”

Reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20180315002952/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3126248.0

Wow, you are funny.  Do you also do stand-up?

https://web.archive.org/web/20180315002952/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3126248.0#msg32332066

https://web.archive.org/web/20180315002952/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3126248.0#msg32332407

O, New World Buddha, that’s not the first time you’ve asked that—nor, I suppose, the zeroeth.  Though it’s true that I love 💓 strong crypto, I’ve quoted Nietzsche, and I so happen to be listening to Bach right now, William of Ockham may suggest this means nothing but that I am possessed of intelligence, good taste, and a passion for privacy.

Outside the foregoing statements, I deem it unwise to be drawn into answering your query.  Excepting one instance thus far whereby I wished to avoid potential trouble to gmaxwell, I have been forced into a “neither confirm nor deny” policy as to such speculations ever since notoriously illiterate forum troll o_e_l_e_o trapped me in a paradox:


Whereupon a scurrilous paparazzo named Ludovico Marchetti (1853–1909) time-travelled to catch a photo of me consorting with a woman who has been accused of being a “working girl”, then leaked the photo onto the Internet via a Russian site:


o_e_l_e_o then bugged my undisclosed secure location, and caught me crying out:


Alas, I have been robbed of my 😈😈😈 PRIVACY!!! 😈😈😈  This sad misfortune has left the sinister o_e_l_e_o bragging, with impeccable logic:


For the coup de grace, after my photo was leaked, unidentified person(s) h4x0r3d my forum account and set my current avatar and personal text to:


Being new here, I can’t seem to figure out the forum’s interface so I can get rid of this.  It is really confusing.  Please help if you can!

Smart Americans make $multimillions, retire early instead of reaching for $billions—then move to Switzerland (modulo the occasional Antarctic wedding anniversary) and publish bumper stickers which once upon a time trolled the Wall Street Journal:


(The same wit was inspired by the ambient sounds from his local Swiss rifle range to “go out with a bang” when ceasing to write software for Microsoft Windows.)

---

Quote cherry-picked according to Quickseller’s own standards of honesty:


On-topic, since the substantive topic of this thread is more about Quickseller than about Lauda:

Leave it to Quickseller to try to enforce the Remaining Evil Empire’s insane claim to tax people anywhere in the world, and more generally, apply their idiotic bought-and-paid-for laws everywhere in the world.  The United States as an entity believes that the world is its property.  Quickseller evidently agrees. /thread

Luck also played a role in selecting which sperm got the egg, resulting in you.

Such is life.  Deal with it.

I presume that you refer to the long hexadecimal string in this spam campaign’s forum sig, not a PGP signature (as in a PGP-signed message).  Well, class, that hexadecimal string is a PGP key fingerprint.  It is calculated from the public part of the primary key, plus some metadata.  To understand what that string is, open your textbooks to RFC 4880 § 12.2:


To construct the public-key packet, you must consult several other sections of the RFC.  Well, that’s not the pertinent part here...  The answer to your question is that a PGP key fingerprint is a SHA-1 hash.  A SHA-1 hash is 160 bits, or 20 binary octets.  Encoded in hexadecimal, that takes 40 characters (not inclusive of any prepended “0x”).

The 64-character “Key ID” mentioned above is simply a portion of the hash.  I don’t consider that to be secure:  Supercomputers or distributed computing can do 2⁶⁴ work; an although this is not directly applicable due to using ASICs made for a different hash, the global Bitcoin mining network already does 2⁶⁴ double-SHA-256 hashes in a fraction of a second.  And the old 32-bit “short ID” is ridiculously insecure, as shown by the Evil32 site.  Rely only on the full fingerprint.  N.b. that although SHA-1 is broken for collision attacks, faking somebody else’s PGP fingerprint would require a preimage attack.  SHA-1 has not been broken for preimage attacks.

For homework, please read RFC 4880.  Tomorrow, I will give you a secret surprise pop quiz on which of the following items are needed to calculate a PGP fingerprint:

[0] IANA-assigned parameter identifying the public-key algorithm

[1] Unsigned 32-bit creation time

[2] Private key data

[3] Public key data

[4] Merkle nonce

[5] A gift to your professor of apple brandy

(Choose all which apply, and none which do not.)


Neither.  My buddy who runs a home distillery had that left over from the ingredients for his latest new batch of brandy.  He switched to Chelmsford Wonder, after I told him that Macintosh is overpriced junk.

Quickseller has here cadged valuable tutoring and consulting from me.  Compare the above to the underlined portions below, plus scores of other posts I made on the same and similar subjects.  Although he is misapplying the lesson insofar as Vod presented colourable evidence, that is not my fault; what matters is that he clearly used my instruction to craft his above-quoted response.

I do not give freebies; consider this to be my bill:  I deem my consulting in this case to be worth 1.31337 BTC.  Quickseller, tell me when you’re ready to pay for services rendered; whereupon I’ll post a fresh address.

Take notice that you must pay promptly.  Take further notice that if you fail to so do, I shall sue you in Internet Court and notify the management of Bitcoin to revoke your wallet.

---

Thanks for the public notice, Vod.  I did not know about the link between Quickseller and TradeFortress; though of course, I read a bit about TradeFortress in the forum archives.

Being new here, I need to ask a question:  Other than a select few such as Mr. Nasty and TradeFortress, is there any well-known forum personality (past or present) with whom Quickseller does not have a fight?

I ask, because I was trying to compile a list of Quickseller’s enemies.  Whereupon I realized that perhaps the opposite task may be easier:  Compile a list of those who are not so.

Really, I can understand making some enemies.  (Really—I of all people can understand that.)  But when someone does most nothing but, that may be indicative.

---

“They’re Quicksy and the Brain...”  (You did say “wackadoodle”.  Wait, TF is the Brain?)

A bit late, but easier to access than googledocs, here are the activity period epochs from 13 March 2018 through 12 March 2019.  As denoted by the “Z”, all times are UTC.  This was generated using the same trivial C program as I used to calculate that theymos could first become eligible to exceed one million activity on 24 November 4748 (a Wednesday) at 12:40:00 UTC.

Period	Date/Time
1257	2018-03-13T19:40:00Z
1258	2018-03-27T19:46:40Z
1259	2018-04-10T19:53:20Z
1260	2018-04-24T20:00:00Z
1261	2018-05-08T20:06:40Z
1262	2018-05-22T20:13:20Z
1263	2018-06-05T20:20:00Z
1264	2018-06-19T20:26:40Z
1265	2018-07-03T20:33:20Z
1266	2018-07-17T20:40:00Z
1267	2018-07-31T20:46:40Z
1268	2018-08-14T20:53:20Z
1269	2018-08-28T21:00:00Z
1270	2018-09-11T21:06:40Z
1271	2018-09-25T21:13:20Z
1272	2018-10-09T21:20:00Z
1273	2018-10-23T21:26:40Z
1274	2018-11-06T21:33:20Z
1275	2018-11-20T21:40:00Z
1276	2018-12-04T21:46:40Z
1277	2018-12-18T21:53:20Z
1278	2019-01-01T22:00:00Z
1279	2019-01-15T22:06:40Z
1280	2019-01-29T22:13:20Z
1281	2019-02-12T22:20:00Z
1282	2019-02-26T22:26:40Z
1283	2019-03-12T22:33:20Z

Further addressed below:



As I emphasized less than 2 hours after starting this thread:


Alia is gone; and Quickseller has not stepped up with any explanation of his vague allegations, much less to produce evidence.  Quelle surprise.

Meanwhile, this thread has been taken over by the same friendly banter as seen in the fan thread.  I think that shows how seriously (or not) everyone takes Quickseller’s speculation as to my identity.

This thread has now served its intended purpose, much as it apparently can; and its presence is detracting from the other thread about me, the one which was previously started by somebody else.  I will therefore now lock this.  If Quickseller (or anybody else) wants this unlocked so as to seriously address the quotes in OP, or if anybody has any other on-topic information (within the scope of forum rules) and wants a place to discuss it, then I will be happy to oblige; ping me by PM or e-mail for an unlock.

Otherwise, please direct further discussion to the thread started by cybersofts.  Thanks.

---

---

Quote from: JayJuanGee on March 08, 2018, 10:03:01 AM

Yeah, but I ran across a baby pic of you, which was a wee bit embarrassing.   

Oh, no!  My baby pic is now plastered all over the Internet.  How did that leak?  I must now perform a thorough investigation as to why my internal security against leaks is as good as the NSA’s.

---

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on March 08, 2018, 11:43:53 AM

I doxxed Nullius weeks ago. He has not denied it, therefore it stands as fact.

Quote from: Michael Cassio (AKA Nullius)

You rogue! You rascal!

The +5 I gave to your original of this was my attempt to bribe you into hushing up about my identity.  Alas!  You continue to dox me in a most artful way.

---

Quote from: suchmoon on March 08, 2018, 05:55:53 PM

Sorry for the confusion, nullius is just a bot that I accidentally unleashed while being slightly inebriated. It seems to have devoured a Merriam-Webster and is acquiring sentience at an alarming rate.

Admitted, I am Michaelbot; and I ate the delicious dictionary you’d carelessly left out between the fine distilled beverages and the Swiss chocolate.  But this programming suffers a logic error:  Given that I am as yet still in the process of acquiring sentience, how can I introspectively contemplate the question of whether I be sentient?

Quote from: suchmoon on March 08, 2018, 05:55:53 PM

Therefore I take full credit for any of its smart and positive actions but no responsibility whatsoever if anything goes wrong.

Truly, you have mastered the art of postmodern politics!

---

Quote from: siddartha1492 on March 12, 2018, 03:24:28 PM

Could it be that you are part of this Cicada group?

Per my standard policy, I neither confirm nor deny that I ever even heard of them.

---

Quote from: criptix on March 13, 2018, 04:36:18 PM

Im sure that the nullius account is new 

Well, let’s perform a bit of numerology on my uid:

Code:

$ factor 976210
976210: 2 5 41 2381

uid 2 and uid 5 do not exist.  (For reference, satoshi is uid 3; and theymos is uid 35.)  #41 “I-am-not-anonymous” is obviously not me, based on its nym; and #2381 “bugmenot” is obviously not me, based on its post history.  Thus, considering the matter logically, I must be either #2 or #5.  The mystery deepens:  Why was my old account deleted?  What heinous deed did I do to get my single-digit uid nuked?

---

Quote from: vlom on March 08, 2018, 07:42:31 PM

come on. shall i start a topic about myself because nobody had done it yet? because nobody remembers me.

Somebody had “done it yet”; indeed, somebody remembers me:

Who the hell is "nullius" the guy is too smart around here (not started by me)

I am not sure how your keen powers of observation missed this, given that it is quoted and linked multiple times on the first page of this thread.

Quote from: vlom on March 08, 2018, 07:42:31 PM

i think this is really not necessary.

This thread was started with a different purpose—a dual purpose:

0. To seriously challenge Quickseller to step up and identify whatever old 2011-vintage account he is alleging to have been mine, as quoted in OP, and publish any other evidence on me he claims to have.

1. A calculated ploy to distract and draw Alia’s attention at a moment when he/she/they was/were actively causing harm in a way which resulted in rapid administrative intervention and a ban.  This thread was started by me at that exact time, before the hammer came down.  Your same aforesaid keen powers of observation may also have failed to notice that Page 1 of this thread is clogged with Alia flamage.  The very top of OP was my deliberate attempt to bait Alia over here; that was then followed by my serious challenge to Quickseller.

(I have now considered archiving and deleting Alia’s posts, but decided to leave them here for convenient reference.)

---

Quote from: LoyceV on March 09, 2018, 10:50:25 AM

It's amazing how you went from "verified by theymos" to "red trust from theymos" to "banned by theymos"!

Quote from: LoyceV on March 09, 2018, 03:23:58 PM

In case someone wonders what happened to alia_alt2, see modlog:

Code:

Autoban user: N/A in topic #0 by member #1924085

---

Quote from: TMAN on March 08, 2018, 10:18:29 AM

/thread

Thanks, DarkStar_.  That post was my Newbie-ranked debut in the Development & Technical Discussion forum, made three days after I started actively posting.  It defends Segwit, and tears into one of the major ulterior motives of the swindlers who lead the Btrash idiots.  That post has a special place in my heart.

---

I myself find that I do best when I don’t think like that.  It can result in what is commonly called “trying too hard”, a sure mark of a junior hack in the world of professional writing.

That being said, I was always conscious that my posts had (I hoped!) a readership who would be “looking and judging”.  That is why, if you check my post history, you will find that my post quality and style are unchanged since introduction of the merit system.  I still talk tech the same way as before, post long “diatribes” the same way as before, insult idiots the same way as before, etc.  The only difference is that my forum presence and subject matter have expanded and evolved, which I think is natural for a new user.


I sometimes do 24–36 hour posting marathons, for the principal purpose of concealing my time zone.  Otherwise, I jet-lag around my sleep schedule.  When user stats were enabled in December, I managed to keep a fairly smooth top across the bar chart of posts by hours per day.  Such is the nature of life in the.nym.zone!

---

Indeed.  Bech32 is awesome; and native Segwit is beneficial to both your fee savings, and the network as a whole.  But you are brave to now use the address format of the future, when so many obsolete products and services are still stuck in the past.  I tried that.  Gave up for now.  Though I have seen some advanced users seemingly use Bech32 addresses as a mark of eliteness amongst themselves.  Anyway, I am hoping that 2018 will be the year of Bech32 adoption.  Here’s hoping that by the beginning of 2019, we will all be using Bech32!

Your implication as to me was not entirely clear; I think you were disclaiming that your words were not self-serving as to yourself, and I don’t wish to cherry-pick a few parts of what you said to turn it backwards.  Nevertheless, for clarity:  I should like to emphasize that my suggestion in OP is strongly against my own interests.  Or at least, it is what most people would consider to be against my interests.

As of now, I could kick back, make one marginal post (barely above the moderators’ deletion threshold) every two weeks, and still be called a “Hero” starting on 12 March 2019.  Also, I am almost two-thirds of the way to Legendary, insofar as merit is concerned.  Yet I am advocating that I should be required to continue working hard here.

That said, I have sufficient pride that I don’t consider a greater challenge to be against my interests.  To the contrary:  As I said in OP, I want for earning Hero rank (and higher) to be something to be proud of.  That means it must be difficult to achieve.

Perspective check:  If the first person below Hero rank to ever reach the Hero rank merit threshold says that the threshold is too low, then I should hope that others would consider that opinion.

---

Nailed it.  Poh-tah-toh.

---

Thanks, hilarious.  But at the high end, as for what you say, my concern is twofold:

0. Changes will become more difficult to make.  For a hilarious analogy, consider the old Bitcoin blocksize.  Do you want to try to design a Segwit to softfork rank requirements between old and new merit thresholds?  Hahah.  Seriously, we already saw enough strife over the “grandfathering” of merits based on rank at the introduction of the merit system.

1. As I said, the difficulty of achieving higher rank should not only increase, but accelerate at the top levels.  Consider officer ranks in a military, or executive ranks in a corporation.  Most “users” will never reach the top ranks, or even remotely approach them.  If this forum is now on some level a meritocracy, then it would be sensible for middle ranks to have moderate requirements, and high ranks to have extreme requirements.

---

I should hope so!


I like what I’m hearing here.  For my part, I have taken to checking post histories before I award merit to those I’ve never seen before—especially those at the Newbie and Jr. ranks, and those in upper ranks who seem to have earned little or nothing above their “grandfathered” merit.  Not a few times, I have backed away from the merit button after a glance at post history revealed bounty posts or other spammish behaviour.  Also, I have recently developed a policy of never awarding more than +1 per post to a Newbie; since this is unfair, I have a very short list of posts to which I plan to return in a few months and add more merit, if I see evidence that the person still deserves it.

---

Length of a post is never a sole criterion of meritoriousness.  I once awarded +5 to a post which contained a single two-letter word “ok”, excluding quotations.  (In context, it was a meritorious action:  Contemptuous dismissal of whining by a merit abuser who got red-tagged.)

---

It is my fault that your computer is a piece of trash.  I apologize.


And that’s my fault, too.  It is not as if proper trimming of quotes were the responsibility of the person who is quoting another post.  I never gently explain quote-trimming to newbies, and certainly never flame non-newbies to a cinder for failure to trim quotes.

You’re right:  To avoid injuring you and your “wobbly” computer, or proximately causing hypothetical untrimmed quotes by others, I must desist from making long posts.

(By the way, didn’t you say that you were a speed-reader?)


How, exactly, would it be “good for self-aggrandizement” for me to place myself further away from Hero rank after I’ve already earned it, at least insofar as merit is concerned?  You seem to have not thought this through.


Try checking my merit summary before you say such things.  Yes, you will consider it “long arsed”; but you can’t properly blame me for that.  My very first merit on 2018-01-25 was awarded by a forum moderator; and that set the trend.  Most of my merit has come from those with sMerit to give.  Many “junior(ish) members” may like my posts; and merit awarded to me by “junior(ish) members” is all the more significant to me for how dear that sMerit is to them.  But by the numbers, they usually don’t have much sMerit.  Furthermore, I see no evidence that anybody has ever awarded me merit out of empathy—a concept I abhor.  I’d throw it in their faces!


Like you do?  Oh, right.  Check post history.

Stop preaching to others what you don’t practice—indeed, what they practice more than you do.  And if you care about the merit system’s integrity, by the way, I suggest that you drop the link currently in your signature and instead start red-tagging beggars.  Listing beggars on your website will have zero effect, other than making you feel better.  It does not help the forum.  The same applies as for ignore-listing.  Whereas I’ve hurt merit-beggars sufficiently that I’ve received a hate-PM advising me in “fuck you!” terms that I seriously hurt a wannabe spammer.  Check my trust summary page, which is also “long arsed” compared to yours.

---

Overall:  Jet Cash, I know that you’re upset over how close you were to the Legendary activity range when the merit system was introduced.  But that is no reason to both mischaracterize my posting and merit histories, and blame me for your “wobbly” computer being unable to handle texts longer than a Tweet.  If you dislike my suggestion for any reason other than that it would place you about 2300 merits away from Legendary rank, I suggest that you argue on its merits (so to speak) rather than posting pointless ad hominem drivel.  HTH.

---

Flying Hellfish is evidently sore because I calmly rejected his ridiculous high-handed preaching to me of sexual mores which I do not share.  Thus, the string of F-bombs and low-brow insults.  This is not an assumption; he underscored his point, “fucking blowy (from a real person”.

As for the advice to “smoke a dube”, no way!  Recreational psychotropic drug use is against my moral values.  I am strongly opposed to the use of marijuana, and very judgmental about it.

This is an inferior version of an idea I had some time ago, for creation of an erotic Bitcoin fetish involving temporary tattoos of QR codes.  My desire to implement this idea influenced many things, including the original motivation for the segvan vanity address generator, and also my ill-fated entanglement with Alia.

Please see the reply in Bitcoin Discussion by my relevant new role account, which is ineligible to post in Serious Discussion:

Erotic Bitcoin fetish: On my precedent idea for sexy QR code (temporary) tattoos

(Note:  I did not see this thread (or any news whatsoever about the Las Vegas ecdysiasts’ QR code use) until Lovecove replied to my earlier post in Meta.  I have developed a habit of checking post history when involved in merit discussions (among other scenarios).  That led here...)

This is actually not the first time I’ve heard the idea of testing people’s self-confidence with a merit/trust gambling thread.  But the version I heard before had a losing proposition of negative trust feedback.  Not a neutral tag.

actmyname, I will take your wager—but only on double-down terms:  Twice whatever you give others, if you think my last 20 posts are overall meritorious—or a red tag from you, if you don’t.

Why?

I am against the whole concept of merit faucets.  Straight from the early days of the merit system (while my merit score was still in double-digits), I argued that merit should only be earned organically.  The system will work optimally if merit is awarded only in the ordinary course of writing and reading—the production, consumption, and trade of thoughts.

A faucet offering +1 might be relatively benign; but if somebody stands to gain a whopping +14, that person should take a serious risk on his self-confidence.  A formally neutral tag is not a sufficient risk of loss, regardless of its comment.  Think you’re good?  Prepare to be richly rewarded, if you’re right—or shot at dawn, if you’re wrong.

Now, here is what I wrote as to this suggestion before:


I do need to take back the part about not asking for merit “on any terms whatsoever”, insofar as since then, I have hit a merit faucet—once.  It’s run by one of the wittiest men on the forum; and I did it not from any need for the offered +1 to “rank up”, but rather, to fulfill a sentimental wish that merit be awarded to a post dear to my heart:


I have also recently gained much more merit than that (+15) by winning a contest.  The contest is for a good cause:  Encouraging post quality through a sportsmanlike competetion, and building a healthy culture against signature spam.  Only the top three contestants each week can get anything at all.  It also awards some modest monetary prizes, which are a considerable motivation to me:  It’s a chance to be paid something for not wearing a paid signature.  I think that’s distinguishable from a faucet, where everybody can “win” (at least till the faucet runs dry).

Now, I ask to hit a faucet again—but with a counteroffer to the terms offered.  I do this to prove a point, to wit:

This is how a merit faucet should be run, and this is how a wager ought be done:  If my last 20 posts are judged by you to be overall the work of a meritorious member of this forum, then please give +14 to the OP in my “😈😈😈 PGP 256% AIRDROP BOUNTY SIGNATURE SPAM CAMPAIGN! Old-school CRYPTO 😈😈😈”, an +14 to the very first post by my new role account.  If not, then red-tag me to hell as a “spammer” with a serious case of the “Dunning-Kruger effect”.⁰  Both of me.

Double trouble.  Let me make a real bet!  Ante up.

---

0. The term is put in scare quotes, so as to not let Dunning and Kruger enjoy the cognitive bias of overestimating their own achievement.  The phenomenon of self-overestimation has been known to students of human experience ever since man first turned a philosophical eye on his fellow men.

I don’t usually follow the Serious Discussion forum, for four principal reasons:

0. I believe that all forums should be for serious discussion—or at least, for high-quality discussion.  I don’t want to contribute to the Bitcoin Forum following some internal version of the well-known “Lifecycle of an Internet Forum”, whereby old-timers are driven out by trash.  Inevitably, the old-timers then proceed to found a new forum—where the lifecycle repeats, just as inevitably.  I would prefer to either contribute my energy to making the ordinary topical forums good places to be—or leave this place entirely.

1. I dislike the idea of my signature being suppressed.  I need my PGP key fingerprint!  Why should I be punished to combat spam?  Likewise as for the post count rule.  Rather than than take these restrictions upon myself, I will choose to post elsewhere.

2. Excluding new accounts from discussion can decrease quality.  Vide my “Newbie” debut in the Development & Technology Discussion forum, made three days after I started actively posting.  That would have been excluded from “Serious Discussion”.

3. A quick skim over threads in “Serious Discussion” shows that its rules do not actually guarantee discussions more serious than I could find elsewhere.  Perhaps the overall S/N ratio may be higher; I’d need to read that forum more to find out.  But if I desire a very serious discussion, I would rather seek out, say, the best threads in Dev & Tech.  Those are serious.

---

I’ve had the foregoing thoughts ever since I first saw notice of “Serious Discussion”.  Now, I am driven to air them by a bit of irritation:  I created a brand-new role account sooner than I’d intended, due to having inadvertently discovered a relevant thread in Serious Discussion.  I wanted to use the new account to reply there.  I bought a Copper Membership for it.  Then, I realized that it is disallowed from posting there; I’d forgotten the Jr. Member rank requirement, since I rarely ever pay attention to that forum.

---

I suggest that Copper Membership should permit immediate posting in Serious Discussion.  I just tried; it doesn’t.  Willingness to pay a nontrivial fee is likely to be a far more reliable indicator of quality than the ability to farm an account for activity, with no merit requirement to reach Jr. rank.  Moreover, the nontrivial fee makes the ban hammer much more painful for those who may be inclined to create throwaway accounts.

For Serious Discussion, at least, this would provide the “legitimate means to bypass” mechanistic rules as mentioned below.

Amidst an Internet “gimme” culture wherein most people expect everything for free, anybody who is willing to pay money for an Internet forum account must be presumed to be—well, serious about it, ipso facto.

---

As for the “Ivory Tower”:  I’ve never set foot in there.  I am excluded from posting in the Ivory Tower, and will remain so until sometime after Activity Period 1257 starts at 19:40:00 (UTC) today, 13 March 2018.  Although I know the virtues of lurking (and did so long before I even created an account), I would not read a forum where I am forbidden from replying.

Although I am not at all against exclusivity, it is important for any strict social exclusions to be based on other than fully mechanistic application of rules such as the activity system; and where mechanistic rules are used, it is important to provide a legitimate means to bypass them where warranted.  Think of it as a social safety valve.  Or perhaps now that the merit system is in place, merit (which is non-mechanistic) should be used as the criterion for “Ivory Tower” access.

For my part, the most valuable discussion I’ve had here has been in Development & Technology Discussion—most of all in a self-moderated thread, where I can nuke trolls without heed to their cries of “censorship”.  That is my ivory tower.

Good question.  I had assumed that some DT(s) must be watching it.  Well, you know what they say about assumptions.  A few entries I spot checked were not tagged; though I have no way of knowing whether that’s due to inattention, lack of evidence in those cases, or me simply picking the wrong ones to spot-check.  Somebody should check more thoroughly to see whether this thread has brought significant results.  And to facilitate that, killyou* ought maintain a tabulated list in the second post as you suggest (see below).


On your quoted inquiry, I realize that this thread really belongs in Reputation.  Unless there be some admin-review intent I don’t know about.

For my part, I have not paid too much attention to this thread.  It is not that I don’t care about merit abuse:  To the contrary, I have done at least enough to fight merit abuse independently that the results caused me to inaugurate my hate mail thread.  Of course, I should do more—and some others have done much more.  Fighting any type of abuse is a time sink, for anybody who is meticulous about evidence.


This.  killyou* did not reserve the second post for that purpose, but did use the second post for allegations against two users (neither of whom have been red-tagged—one of which had previously been neutral-tagged by actmyname on suspicion, apparently without sufficient evidence to meet actmyname’s standards).  killyou* can and should edit that post, move its current content elsewhere, and use the post for a maintained table or list summarizing information from this thread.


(3) Facilitates the task of independently assessing evidence, and issuing negative trust feedback to any users independently deemed untrustworthy for reason of cheating the merit system.  (Closely analogous to cheating in school:  Untrustworthy behaviour.)

(4) Helps others check to see whether or not this thread is actually bringing results—and assess why.  It would also help evaluate whether sufficient evidence is being offered for allegations.

(You did say, “at least two things”.  Both of yours, I concur with.)


In cases where I see sufficient evidence of untrustworthiness (and have time to review that evidence!), I myself red-tag untrustworthy persons, regardless of the factors you state.  My general reasoning is stated in my written trust feedback policy.  If warranted, I myself would red-tag a DT member, a Legendary, a <=5-digit uid, an account registered in 2010—it doesn’t matter to me; all that matters to me is substantial evidence of wrongdoing which shows untrustworthiness in my own judgment.

Naturally, as such, I speak only for myself.  YMMV.


Look for negative feedback with comments calling out merit abuse.  The sent feedback list on my own trust feedback page reflects many examples of tags issued for various kinds of merit abuse (also trust system abuse).  However, as said above, my existing tags were all issued without reference to this thread.  Also, I have been slack lately.

(Note:  I am not in DT, whatever some trolls may think; however, there have been cases in which a merit abuser tagged by me was later tagged by a DT.  This includes the case cited above which brought me hate mail:  A “fuck you!” PM arrived in my inbox after a DT issued a tag.  I guess that put a crimp in someone’s “free money now” spam scheme.)

This post was mostly drafted on 27 February 2018.  It was delayed by some unlucky drama; I now post it on the negative one-year anniversary of when I can first be activity-eligible for Hero rank.

Starting with 17 merits awarded to some of my old Jr. Member posts by people who remember them, I reached the Hero threshold of 500 merits within 27 days, 8 hours, 16 minutes, 22 seconds of active posting.  All in all, from the moment that theymos announced the merit system, it took me 32 days, 9 hours, 14 minutes, 51 seconds to go from zero to Hero—at least insofar as merit is concerned.  Yet when I received my 500th merit, I still had a 98 activity level; the earliest I can reach Hero Member status will be Activity Period 1283, which will start during 12 March 2019.

This is not to brag about myself.  There is already a thread which somebody else started to do that for me; and anyway, the number below my name speaks for me, in and of myself.  Rather, I am offering an object demonstration in support of my suggestion that merit requirements for the highest ranks are far too easy.

Moreover, from discussions I’ve observed and also from patterns of abuse, I think some small adjustments are needed at the lowest ranks.  I do think that the middle ranks’ thresholds are fairly set for ordinary decent posters.

Here is my concrete suggestion for merit thresholds, with proposed changes set in bold.  Discussion of my reasoning follows.

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I do think that the merit requirements for ranks through Member through Sr. Member are currently optimal.  To rise in rank at the level permitted by activity currently requires earning merit at an average rate of just over +1/day.  I think that’s a reasonable expectation for an ordinary intelligent person who spends a moderate amount of time engaging in generally pleasant forum discussions.

But “Hero” and “Legendary” are such strong words; and the substance of successful ranking systems always holds the highest ranks to standards which not only increase, but accelerate.

Proud, unapologetic elitist though I am, I do not for one moment imagine that I be a superman.  If I can merit zero to Hero in four weeks, then surely any person who wishes to bear a rank and title of honour should be able to earn much more than a measly one merit per day.

Wherefore, I urge that @theymos consider the following adjustments:

• The merit threshold for “Hero Member” should be raised to at least 1000, perhaps 1500.  I don’t really think that earning a bit over +2–3 merit per activity-day (or waiting a very long time) should qualify somebody as a “Hero”; but anything less is an insulting abuse of the term.
• The merit threshold for “Legendary” should be raised to at least 3000, perhaps even 5000.  Likewise:  Can somebody who fails to average less than around +3–5 merit per activity-day be called a “Legend” with a straight face?  I fear my standards are too low here.

Don’t simply be proud of these titles:  Make them signify an achievement to be proud of!

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Of course, I waved my hands past one obvious flaw in premises:  I infer that the system is designed so that good posters “rank up” at about the same rate as before; and I agree with that goal.  But the mechanism does not enforce it.  A system with a “merit velocity” measure would surely be an easy programming task; however, it would be unpredictable and confusing for humans.  On the latter account, I would argue against any such system.  Moreover, I suggest that this “flaw” is unproblematic.

If an ordinary reasonable poster steadily makes decent posts for years, plural, then they will enter the top ranks simply on the basis of seniority, patience, and predictable dependability.  It seems obvious to me that such a person is here for all the “right reasons”, and barely even interested in matters of rank (or its potentially lucrative increase of privileges).  Certainly, I doubt that any spammer or account farmer could keep it up that long without being nuked by mods.

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Final note:  Now is a good time to raise merit thresholds for Hero and Legendary.  I myself am the only person below Hero rank who has thus far passed the Hero threshold; and I hereby waive any complaints I might have if that threshold were suddenly doubled or trebled at this time.  Starting now, I’d have another year to reach the new threshold...

Anybody else who legitimately even comes close to having earned 500 merits is already Hero or Legendary.  Thus at this time, a change in merit rules for the highest ranks would neither have any impact on anybody (except me) who had already passed the higher thresholds, nor create any disparity between accounts which “ranked up” before and after the change of rules.

Changing the rules for Jr. Member and Member would cause some small unfairness.  However, the thresholds in question are trivial; and the unfairness and disparities thus caused would be commensurately insignificant.  It may be understood if somebody who had earned >500 merit were to be upset by a changing of the Hero threshold, especially if anybody else had already ranked up to Hero under the initial merit rules.  But anybody negatively affected by changes in the 10–30 merit range should see the disparity evened out within a very short time, if a good poster.  I’d expect that any complaints over such changes would only come from those who have been whining about the merit system in total, viz., wannabe spammers.

All in all, the time to make changes is when the merit system is still yet young.