LOL. Have you been blind? As ibminer said this had been a show of "good ol' boys club".
Using my best judgement with the information I currently have, there is no hard evidence or proof of this happening now. I have fears of it growing into this issue. If anything like that is happening now, I'd guess it's on a small scale. It seems obvious there are at least like-minded thoughts that exists with a group of DT members, but that doesn't necessarily prove a "club" exists. I'll admit part of my fears stemmed from the fact that this like-minded group appeared to be originating from one DT member, then I saw the comment about a sanctioning by "upper-level DT member
s", so I've been curious where this comes from and wanted to see who else may support it.
The main question that I have to anyone that is opposed to tagging spammers, what solution to you propose instead?
I would suggest leaving neutral feedback starting with "Spammer" or whatever word we agree on, and ask signature managers to disallow users with that trust.
From an advertisers perspective, I assume a lot of them do not care about the post quality, it's just getting their advertisement shown as many times in as many places as possible. They know that red flagged users on this forum are not seen as trusted and carry a high chance of having their advertisement ignored or seen as a scam, so it more aggressively eliminates a piece of their audience.
Leaving neutral feedback probably will not solve anything, those managers will probably just allow the accounts with neutral because they are not going to eliminate as many viewers as a red account, and I find it unlikely that most of the campaign managers would take the time to look through to see neutral feedbacks.
Again, I can't say I'm opposed to the idea of DT tagging spammers assuming admins/mods can't handle it and need help, but I do feel like there is a higher potential for abuse and too many blurred lines on what could be considered a quality post. Some are obvious, others will be controversial
...the potential for racketeering comes to mind.
**And no, this thread was
not intended to be a Lauda or The Pharmacist reputation thread.