Just so people know... selling accounts is allowed.
I wonder why though. Are there any good reasons to buy an account for non-scammers?
Ok getting past the newbie jail, but that's not really that much of an argument.
Giveaways that are usless to the account owner, meh. A slight argument, but nothing in face of the disadvantages of making the life for scammers easier.
Yeah..... Why is selling accounts allowed?
So they can scam people by creating fake enthusiasm about new stuff (e.g. alt-coins).
That's what comes to my mind, and I won't be a part of it.
I think AliceWonder has nailed it. I don't see any other reason that someone would buy accounts. They are buying the account holder's reputation, for whatever that may be worth. A reputation is, after all, a thing of great value that it takes a long time to build. It is worth something. So, it's no wonder that there are people willing to buy it. That is to be expected.
The real culprit in the transaction is the seller. He takes all of the trust he has built up and sells it to god-knows-who. It can pretty much be assumed that the buyer is unscrupulous, as he intends to pose publicly as something which he is not. So, why would someone sell their account, knowing -- or at least subconsciously suspecting -- that this is the case? I submit that the answer to that question lies in the seller's heart. Ask him why he has decided to sell out and quit the human race?
The board moderators cannot really stop this, and shouldn’t be expected to. But, in my opinion, they should not openly permit it.
This problem is obviously not unique to this board. Quite frankly, I never thought about this until this thread was started. It has opened my eyes. Sure, I often have several accounts on the same forum; for various reasons. But it never occurred to me to sell one of them.
Wachtwoord has offered a solution: identity verification through pgp-signs. It sounds plausible. Perhaps the moderators could look into this, and implement it as part of the account registration process.
