It turns out that BadBear does not want me to have separate threads for the three separate issues. Therefore, I have posted below the content of the OPs of the three issues. I hope that people responding can make it clear which of these issues they want to talk about and we'll try to manage this thread as some sort of 3 in 1.
Hi everyone (especially tomatocage),
I'm starting this thread because the previous thread on it (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.msg12042510#msg12042510) had other issues tied up in it and TC seems to be refusing to engage with it. To that end, I'm breaking out TC's part of the issues into a separate thread so that it can be discussed separately. It's my hope that in doing this, TC will decide to go ahead and engage with the problem to get it solved.
Here's the quick summary:
A few months ago, TC added Quickseller to his trust list. As I think many people know, QS is waging a personal war on me and wants to see me smeared off the forum. Therefore at the time that TC added QS, I politely asked TC to talk to QS about he problematic ratings. TC quickly and politely replied and within 24 hours, QS had changed his false ratings to neutral, allowing everyone to get on with their lives happily.
Next thing you know, QS made several more false ratings, accusing people of doing things they hadn't done and generally making a hash of his newfound responsibilities (as had happened before with him, when he was on badbear's list). So, TC removed him. Okay, no problem for me, whatever.
But now that QS was no longer beholden to the truce TC had brokered, he changed his ratings back to negatives and even made a new account and started neg-repping me with that one too. Still not really a problem because QS was not on the default list.
Now, just 2 or 3 weeks ago, TC re-added QS to his trust list, and so QS's false ratings were once again unfairly plaguing my reputation.
So, naturally, I reached out to TC to ask him to reimplement his conditions on QS. These are TC's own words to QS on the matter as he shared with me in our first correspondence session when he originally added QS (emphasis mine):
At some point in the past I decided that I, and all the people I have in my Trust list, should leave ratings that are as impartial as possible with a strong lean toward giving the benefit of the doubt to a user (ie. sofia26, but that's another story all together).
So why did TC's policy change in this regard? Only he can say. But here's where the fishiness really begins:
It turns out that TC had me PM blocked before I had even said anything to him. So I wasn't even able to ask him privately to broker the peace he had done before. Instead, I had to make a public thread about it (linked above). After many days, he finally popped into that thread a single time and merely stated this:
I re-added QS to my list because he's good at weeding out the scammers. While I realize that there may be some ruffled feathers because of this, I feel that it's better to prevent people from losing potentially a lot of real money than it is to have a handful of people upset about it. In the end though, your grievance is with QS, not with me.
He has not said anything further. This new policy of "if someone I trust has abused you, your problem is with them not with me" is a far-cry from what he'd said in the past "I and all the people in my trust list should leave ratings which are as impartial as possible". So again, what has changed?
The further fishiness is this, and this is quite speculative, but given that TC seems intent on not communicating with me regarding the trust-abuser that he trusts, I think there's really no choice but to bring it up. QS was recently selling an account on default trust. I have no idea what account it was nor do I have any idea if it actually sold, but he was posting about it publically as funfunnyfan (it's one of the accounts he's used to trust spam me so you can find the record of it in my trust list). Interestingly, only 2 days before being readded to TC's list and TC pm-blocking me, QS made this threat:
Indeed, once I had been the victim of a quickseller smear attack I started reading those meta threads saying quickseller was falsely accusing them with a new view.
You are lying again. You were falsely accused of nothing. You are a scammer and a troll. As I said in the beginning of this post, it is offensive that you have been allowed to troll for as long as you have. If results are not seen immediately, then further action will be taken to ensue that you are prevented from further trolling and from further spamming.
Your slander is worthless
He literatlly says that "if results are not seen immediately then further action will be taken". What does this mean? Is this referring to him adding himself to the default trust list because he controls the TC account? I certainly hope not. Yet, because TC will not talk to me and has apparantely changed his policy from one of "everyone I trust needs to be impartial" to "your gripe is with QS, not with me" and preemptively refuses to engage with this discussion, we have to ask.
Again, the point of this thread is to solicit that TC engage with this issue. If he trusts a trust-abuser, that's quite literally on him and his reputation. The idea that people are getting hurt by this and they are merely collateral damage because someone else with "real money" might get hurt if QS isn't on default is problematic at best. Furthermore, the idea that you can merely ignore these sorts of problems and hope that they go away by themselves is doubly problematic, in my opinion. It may be that QS will continue to slash-and-burn his way through this forum and that the next false accusation will somehow make someone notice that he really does not belong on any kind of default list until he can let go of childish personal attack campaigns against people that he's never traded with just because he doesn't like them, but in the mean time, the idea that TC doesn't take responsibility for people on his trust list really reflects poorly on him, in my opinion.
To be clear, I've had almost zero interaction with TC other than our brief exchange a few months ago in which he correctly forced QS to take responsibility for his actions before being added to default trust. The idea that QS is now on the list under TC's auspices and no longer adhering to his policy means that TC is vouching for these false ratings. Therefore I'm doing what I think is the correct move, I'm opening a thread in meta to ask TC to discuss these ratings that he's currently vouching for.
TC, please speak up and join this discussion so that we can get this sorted out. It's been nearly 6 months now since QS started his slander campaign and I know I'm quite tired of dealing with it. I hope you'll step up and take responsibilty if you're going to vouch for this kind of behavior.
I hope that Tomatocage will respond soon to this topic I.
As has been discussed previously (but not conclusively), QS has left me a negative rating which is based on zero evidence, is clearly punitive and meant to smear me off the forum. This topic is being started in order to discuss the merits of QS's false rating separately from the other issues which complicated this thread
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1129059.40 (the previous one).
A quick recap for those who aren't in the know:
1) Early in this year, I called out Quickseller for his temper. I told him that he shouldn't be calling people idiots and that there are more helpful ways to disagree.
2) QS responded by calling me and idiot.
3) QS further responded by logging in as an alt and beginning to troll me. He told me that he'd be having me kicked off my signature ad campaign and made other threats.
4) QS spent 24 hours looking through years of posts in order to try to find something against me.
5) QS found tradefortress' false accusations on me and necro-bumped a 2.5 year old thread to threaten me using his main alt ACCTSeller
6) QS logged back in with his main account, and "found" the bump from ACCTSeller, and used it as an excuse to neg rep me.
7) QS's plan backfired, temporarily, the signature ad campaign continued to employ me because they could see that what was happening was someone trying to troll me; QS's vitriolic temper became well known; not long after he was kicked off of badbear's trust list
Cool QS continued to troll me for months
...
And that basically brings us to where we are today. Now QS has been readded to default trust and his rating are again causing me issues. I have no desire here except to be left along and it blows my mind that someone who has publically acted in such a way as QS could be added to a default trust list. How can you trust someone who takes such extreme measures to exact vengence on someone just because you don't like that hey called you hot-tempered?
At this point, basically everyone who has weighed in on this issue says that they find it extremely hard to believe that such nonsense could go on for so many months and yet, here we are. I'm pretty convinced that when QS started his smear campaign against me he just thought that I would roll over and die, or perhaps purchase a new account (from him?!) and try to get back to hero member status in a few years. That he could steamroll me off of the forum. However, I'm not going to let that happen. Instead, I'm publically calling attention to this behavoir and asking what we can do.
I think it's going to be next to impossible to get QS to remove his false ratings at this point. I'd love to find out that I'm wrong, but the last thing that QS has said to me was basically mocking me and everyone else. He said that he'd be paying 0.1BTC to the first person who could convince him to leave me alone. So, what to do now?
I have opened another thread in which I solicit TC to reconsider his trust of QS, or else to at least talk to me about it. But that is purposely in another thread so that here we can discuss trust abuse by QS against me and what do about it. I'd like to further add that at this point, a number of poeple have spoken to me about this privately (mods can verify this) but asked not to be revealed because of the attack power of QS. People are afraid to cross him. Is that the kind of person who should be on default trust?
There is at least one other obvious solution, other people on default trust can remove QS from their trust lists in order to fix this. I honestly have no idea about the internal politics of this. Is it seen as a slight against Tomatocage if, say, badbear adds ~Quickseller to his trust list? I don't know.
I also don't know what to do about this issue. I think a lot of people are afraid to speak up and those that are speaking up are asking QS to drop this assault. I wish he would. I look forward to your input.
On this last topic III, there is a minor update which is that I have written a personal message to Quickseller to try to see if we can talk in private in order to come to some agreement over this. I have to admit that I am not extremely optimistic that this will work, but I think it's worth a try. Literally everyone on here is tired of hearing about this issue (I think) and perhaps even Quickseller is ready to admit that I'm not a threat to anyone. If he and I can work something out privately, it may be that Topic III will soon be resolved.