Contradictory rules, account sell VS merit sell. On addition trust view to guest

[The Cryptovator]

Contradictory rules:

There is lots of post against account sell, so I don't want to repeat it. My question is about rules no.18,

18. Having multiple accounts and account sales are allowed, but account sales are discouraged

Well, means account sell allow on this rules. But on the main topic we can't found any rules regarding merit sell. I think OP should update about it.

However we can find rules about merit sell posted by another moderator.

Can I sell merit?

Selling merit is disallowed.

So sell an rank account with merit isn't equal to merit sell ? Rule isn't contradictory each other? Selling account means sold all merit also. No one trading newbie account. Do you think Rules no.18 should be change based on current situation? Merit wasn't implemented during post the rules and seems OP(mprep) didn't change rules and never add rules about merit sell. Both rules can't be applicable same time.

I raise the question because currently lot of account sell happening very poorly.  Also buyer raising question after got tag, why they are getting tag since forum allow it?
According to merit sell rules obviously they deserve red tag. Account sell with merit== merit sell. Admin should decide which rule will should modify.

Edit;
On addition look like merit sell discourage by admin,

If a DT member tags you for something stupid involving merit (ie. probably anything less than selling merit), then they're not going to be a DT member for much longer.

Show trust rating to guest:

A topic has discussed about rating ; well wrote OP and already discussed on several time.

I will try to explain briefly, why it's important show trust rating to guest,
There was a scam accusation, Scam report BEWARE ! jamesclef is a scammer posted on July 07, 2017 and scammer got tag on same date by multiple DT. Recently another scam accusation against same user, jamesclef is a SCAMMER. luxsocks account, posted on January 24, 2019, unfortunately accuser was guest and he didn't see trust rating of scammer. Below is accuser statement;

I know it was my fault for not checking but you can't see a user's trust if you're not registered.

Most likely accuser was guest or not logged in. There is more similar case. Someone should not get scam only just for he is not member of forum or not logged in. Sometimes peoples search on google for something. Since this forum SEO rating is high obviously it will show on google if match with search.

So as soon as possible theymos should reconsider this matter, as far as I know he is also thinking about it.

The main reason that I went for this solution rather than forcing custom lists is that I would like to show some trust indicator to guests. But before doing that, I want to see whether these modifications can actually be made to work. If not, then I may go to the force-custom-lists solution, and that's incompatible with guests seeing any trust indicators.

   

[SaltySpitoon]

If I'm not mistaken, merit sources aren't allowed to sell merit. Individuals can sell merit, but again you run the same risk of having all accounts involved marked with negative feedback.

[Quickseller]

If I'm not mistaken, merit sources aren't allowed to sell merit. Individuals can sell merit, but again you run the same risk of having all accounts involved marked with negative feedback.

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

[actmyname]

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

The foundation for giving out such negative trust would be the intent of a transaction.

[SaltySpitoon]

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

I don't know, I personally don't care one way or another. I'd hope the people that do link accounts together have enough brains to look for obvious patterns of merit selling, and leave the coincidences alone. To this point I haven't seen much meta/reputation bellyaching about being falsely neg rated for merit selling, so I'd assume its not all that common.

[OgNasty]

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

I don't know, I personally don't care one way or another. I'd hope the people that do link accounts together have enough brains to look for obvious patterns of merit selling, and leave the coincidences alone. To this point I haven't seen much meta/reputation bellyaching about being falsely neg rated for merit selling, so I'd assume its not all that common.

I think instead of buying merit, these folks should mine Grin and use it to purchase Copper Memberships.

[mikeywith]

I do not see any contradiction in the rules.

buying/selling an account is not a 'crime' in itself, it's more or less it's like selling a knife to somebody that you don't know, while it may be sold to a housewife who will use it to cut tomato, it could also be a 10 years old that could misuse it terribly.

The main reason why many members of the community think that accounts sales are scam related, is because most of those account buyers tend to misuse the reputation of that account to attempt scam, if this forum had no trading related stuff, then account sales would not be as discouraged as it is now.

selling merit however is a different story its like selling the gun to that 10 year old kid while you know it, merit is supposed to distinguish quality posters vs shit posters, by buying merit you obtain a good quality member status while being a shit-posters, which in the long run will make the merit system useless,therefore a shitposter might have a better "quality" status than a top notch member.


 

[Cashi]

The main reason why many members of the community think that accounts sales are scam related, is because most of those account buyers tend to misuse the reputation of that account to attempt scam, if this forum had no trading related stuff, then account sales would not be as discouraged as it is now.

I think the point of Coolcryptovator was to outline account sales are similar to Merit sales. When the account ranked up before the merit system was introduced, these accounts got airdropped Merit (10 / 100 / 250...) and when someone sells his accounts he sells indirectly also Merit. And in addition, account sales are done to send the unused sMerit to own accounts or sell them - which is Merit abuse.

Account trading is not only punished by DT because of misusing a green trusted account, it's also for misusing sMerit and gaining a high ranked account without any effort (and therefore gaming the Merit system). I agree to OP that the rules can be clarified and we should add a rule about Merit sales.

[mikeywith]

Account trading is not only punished by DT because of misusing a green trusted account, it's also for misusing sMerit and gaining a high ranked account without any effort (and therefore gaming the Merit system). I agree to OP that the rules can be clarified and we should add a rule about Merit sales.

if Ranks and Merit matters in DT decisions, then they would tag every legendary who has less than 1000 earned merit ! people can also argue that those who got air-dropped merit got it without any considerable efforts. some of them have not manged to earn a single merit up to this point.

Account rank: are directly connected to trade/trust/scam , simply because high rank accounts are more trusted.
Merit : are not directly to related to trade/trust/scam , simply because many low rank members have more merit than high rank members but they are still untrusted simply due to their rank.

you know this when you visit the market place, most vouch copies are given to Legendary and Hero accounts ( regardless of their merit score), people there do not care about merit and i don't see a reason why they should to be honest, more merit does not mean more trust, neither higher rank , but for some reason the rank seem to give more trust.

[suchmoon]

if Ranks and Merit matters in DT decisions, then they would tag every legendary who has less than 1000 earned merit ! people can also argue that those who got air-dropped merit got it without any considerable efforts. some of them have not manged to earn a single merit up to this point.

Account rank: are directly connected to trade/trust/scam , simply because high rank accounts are more trusted.
Merit : are not directly to related to trade/trust/scam , simply because many low rank members have more merit than high rank members but they are still untrusted simply due to their rank.

you know this when you visit the market place, most vouch copies are given to Legendary and Hero accounts ( regardless of their merit score), people there do not care about merit and i don't see a reason why they should to be honest, more merit does not mean more thrust, neither higher rank , but for some reason the rank seem to give more trust.

The wording might be confusing, particularly to newbies, and scammers and other sleazy traders take advantage of that. If you didn't know anything about the forum, whom would you consider more trustworthy, all other things being equal:

Jr. Member or Sr. Member?
Member or Hero?
Copper or Legendary?

I'd suggest to change all ranks to derogatory titles, such as bozo, dolt, twit, etc. Would fix the problem overnight.

[Cashi]

if Ranks and Merit matters in DT decisions, then they would tag every legendary who has less than 1000 earned merit !

Why should they tag accounts just because they haven't earned many Merits? If someone wasn't involved in shady business no matter if scam, Merit trading or something else his account wouldn't get a negative tag.

I actually meant a red tag makes no difference if someone sells an account or trades Merit directly. In every case he is gaming the rules and can get a negative tag if detected. Selling Merit can also be considered as buying a higher rank.

[mikeywith]

I'd suggest to change all ranks to derogatory titles, such as bozo, dolt, twit, etc. Would fix the problem overnight.

 as a non-native English speaker, allow me to tell you that these 3 words mean exactly the same thing ,and i imagine the same person/s when reading every word.

honestly i do agree that these ranks are some how confusing misleading, i once blindly trusted a legendary rank member when i first joined the forum, thinking there was only 10-20 of them around and they won't risk their reputation. he scammed me for 150$ , i thought he was stupid, but turned out that his account worth less than 150$ and i was stupid.

I actually meant a red tag makes no difference if someone sells an account or trades Merit directly. In every case he is gaming the rules and can get a negative tag if detected. Selling Merit can also be considered as buying a higher rank.

selling accounts is not against the rules.
selling merit is against the rules. ( at least based on the OP)


and as i explained above, trading these two have different objectives and consequences, therefore when the forum "allows" account sales and "disallow" merit sale i do not see any contradictions unlike what the OP thinks.  

[r1s2g3]

There are so many forums where there is no setting to show account trust, so how the people dealing there?
Expecting people to remain dumb and adding more type of scores does not mean anything. They will ignore the scores saying "I am new, I do not know what that score means at that time"?
You don't need rules for everything to understand what is wrong or right,your moral judgement also suffice.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

<***>

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

If a merit seller is busted, negative tag should be given to the accounts involved in that transaction. Then a little more investigation can be carried out and neutral tages can be given to those users that have receive huge number of merit for a shitpost from the merit seller (could be possible buying and since no evidence of transaction a warning is perfect )  but if you see a quality post recieve merit from the seller, that account shouldn't be tag because we don't have a limit to merit amount rewards on quality posting.

The question now should be, how do you know if it's shitpost. If you see such post and you aren't sure them open a thread on the reputation board and other experience members will assist in the investigation.

[KingZee]

I don't think selling merit would be against the rules. The whole reasoning why it wasn't banned in the first place was because if you ban account selling on bitcointalk, people are going to sell them elsewhere. The black market for such things will always exist. Same for merits.

So since selling an account means you do not care about trust, you promote scammy behavior, etc... Selling merit probably would take the same judgement, because when you sell merit you're making people look like something they shouldn't be.

Mods don't have time to waste on monitoring a black market that will exist regardless, so it figures to just leave it to the community to red-tag any people contributing to that kind of behavior. Which honestly makes sense, if you can make an alt account go ahead, but if people know that you sell accounts it means you cannot be trusted. Same for giving/receiving fake merits, it means you're doing it for some sort of un-ethical reason..

[tranthidung]

Not totally exact!
Account selling is allowed, but only discouraged.

18. Having multiple accounts and account sales are allowed, but account sales are discouraged.

selling accounts is not against the rules.

At least, theymos has not officially stated that selling merits is one of forum rules' violations.
Check it please:

While we will not be directly moderating this, I encourage people to give merit to posts that are objectively high-quality, not just posts that you agree with.

Maybe, theymos mentioned about the violation of merit selling somewhere else. I will check it more.

selling merit is against the rules. ( at least based on the OP)

[Quickseller]

Out of curiosity, what would the basis be for giving negative trust to someone receiving merit? Someone could be selling merit privately, get caught and have given merit to an innocent person. Or, someone could make a person look bad by giving merit when they are a known merit salesman.

I don't know, I personally don't care one way or another. I'd hope the people that do link accounts together have enough brains to look for obvious patterns of merit selling, and leave the coincidences alone. To this point I haven't seen much meta/reputation bellyaching about being falsely neg rated for merit selling, so I'd assume its not all that common.

I am not aware of any cases in which someone has (attempted) to sell merit, at least not publicly.

If someone did want to sell merit, they would probably tell potential customers to contact them via PM or via some other off site mode of communication.

[The Cryptovator]

I am not aware of any cases in which someone has (attempted) to sell merit, at least not publicly.

There is, I just can't remember the thread. Nevermind whatever discusses outside of forum, we can't prevent them. But publicly selling account/merit on the forum is really a shady rules.

If I'm not mistaken, merit sources aren't allowed to sell merit. Individuals can sell merit, but again you run the same risk of having all accounts involved marked with negative feedback.

May be you are wrong. Where did you found merit sell is allowed except merit source? Do you have any reference link? Your statement might mislead people's.

If a DT member tags you for something stupid involving merit (ie. probably anything less than selling merit), then they're not going to be a DT member for much longer.

Seems admin discourage about sell merit.

My main point isn't about merit abuse really. Selling account means directly selling merit. Account sell=/=merit sell directly and publicly. So tagging account seller is appropriate. That's my opinion.

[actmyname]

I view it the same way as I always have.

Buying trust is equivalent to buying reputation.
Buying accounts is equivalent to buying reputation.
Buying merit is equivalent to buying reputation.

WLOG replace buying with selling.

All three are taggable.

[tranthidung]

Agree!

I view it the same way as I always have.

Buying trust is equivalent to buying reputation.
Buying accounts is equivalent to buying reputation.
Buying merit is equivalent to buying reputation.

WLOG replace buying with selling.

All three are taggable.

In short, buying bitcoin and / or grin coin is a best option at the moment.