I feel that Lauda does a lot more good than harm for the forum and that is why I keep him in my trust list.
I'm not going to be the only person that's disappointed by this being the voiced criteria and reasoning for this. I don't disagree with the statement, but I disagree that this should be the criteria for keeping them on your list.
There are plenty of people that do more good than harm that still do a tremendous amount of harm, so much so that it would be very dangerous to use this reasoning.
You should keep them on your trust if you feel that they are very unlikely to do any meaningful damage to the forum in a way that violates or abuses the responsibility that comes along with DT; plus there should be significant benefit for their addition.
This reminds me of Dave Chapelle's bit about Bill Cosby; "He saves more than he rapes!"
The significant benefit is that he tags scammers and helps keep that under control. Will he sometimes mess up with a rating?? most likely, but if/when he does he just needs to make it right. The trust system is not perfect, but no one can come up with a better one so it is what it is. Obviously other members of DT1 agree he is valuable otherwise he would not be back on.
No, more members of DT1 disagree with you than agree. I also don't think he's ever stopped a scam. He tried to pull an extortion scam, sure, that's documented. What scam has he ever stopped? When a majority of the forum is showing red trust, all it does is water down what that means. Nobody is trusting newbies with crap posts on trades without escrow and signature campaign managers can do their own research if they have a shred of competence. What Lauda is doing is bad for Bitcoin adoption, bad for bitcointalk, and bad for anyone trying to engage in peaceful discussion with likeminded individuals using this forum.
Please, tell me what scam you avoided as a result of Lauda's trust ratings which you praise so highly.
From what I can tell it is an even split with 3 being for him (myself, hilarious, and salty) and 3 being against (you, HostFat, and TC). I have looked through his ratings multiple times and agree with most of his feedbacks regarding account sales, scams, shit posting, account farming, alt accounts, people who have defaulted on loans, etc... It is impossible to say what he has prevented because with his feedback those people are not trusted to pull there crap again. We need these types of users stopped and he is willing to spend the time to go after them. I have watched this forum go downhill for years due to the above crap with no other fixes in sight... Do you prefer people to farm, spam, scam, etc... with hardly any repercussions? If you have a better method for helping to clean things up by all means tell me.