Quote from: Flying Hellfish on January 01, 2014, 05:33:14 AM

Honestly I thought (and maybe still do if I am honest) that the significant amount of money BFL was spending on advertising here influenced mods decisions.

I don't know what mechanism you think it could have accomplished that. I moderated here then purely as a volunteer. Recently the forum started paying mods based on activity out of its substantial war-chest makes it a little easier to not feel guilty about spending some time on it instead of other activities but that started after all the major BFL drama went down, though I'm completely ignorant about the advertising stuff. I have no idea who pays what for what, I know there are auctions, but I don't believe I've ever even loaded the one of them.

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You shouldn't be making estimations on ROI to conclude an companies legitimacy.

I think I must not have been very clear. In the pre-OP posts Entropy-uc expressed the view that people shouldn't care about protecting others from getting ripped off. I disagreed, expressing the view that miners getting ripped off is bad for Bitcoin as whole. I subsequently elaborated that this Bitcoin-as-a-whole concern is primarily related to mining breaking even, and that this concern is addressed if the miners break even, even if the vendors are slimely-slimeballs-who-slime.

The reason I pointed it out is because this bitcoin-as-a-whole concern is a problem with practically every vendor right now, not just the supposedly dishonest ones. Some of the better liked hardware makers are turning around their sales and using the income to buy a multiple of the hashrate for themselves. This worrys me because I am concerned that it undermines the security model in Bitcoin. I've expressed this concern many times, and specifically in a few vendors threads.

I try to be somewhat conservative about it, because I don't want to be one of those sociopath miners who tells everyone else mining can't be profitable while they're happily buying up all the hardware they can.

[Not that I don't personally care about the people who get jerked around by poorly managed companies or scammers, but bad things are going on all the time all over the world and especially in Bitcoin. I damaged friendships in begging people not to invest in Pirate40 and in warning people off of many other outright scams. My heart can bleed for only so many wounded, and at some point triage sets in.]

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BFL was clearly illegally with holding refunds and you seemingly not only turned a blind eye

I am not your mommy wellI'm actually quite paternalistic in places where I have full reign but the style of the forum is that you need to look out for yourself. This is advertised everywhere. The forum leaves known, even admitted, scammers to post. This is not necessarily policy I agree with (although I suppose I understand the arguments: better the known threat), but its the kind of open community that exist here, and really not all that many other places.

There is simply nothing I can do, as a moderator, to help about these things. I have no power over these companies. And even when I express even the most mild disapproval just as a regular user of the forum, which I also am I am met with vicious attacks by the companies supporters. I only know what I've experienced too. People do make fraudulent scam accusations on the forums (and elsewhere on the internet) in order to try to extort reputable vendors and persons.

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Honestly I don't put any more weight on what Mods or admin or hero members have to say.

As you should. I'm not just a moderator here, I'm a miner who's bin around longer than the vast majority, and one of the developers of Bitcoin-QT, there are lot of different perspectives I can speak from here. The moderator one is the least interesting. In some communities "moderators" get called "janitors": It's more accurate, sometimes I pull out a mop and clean up after some crazy person has crapped on the floor. What policy I make is generally procedural: Vomit goes in the green bin, used diapers in the red bin.

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I personally think you have not treated all companies the same and as a mod I believe you should have.

I absolutely haven't. Companies have come and gone without me even noticing them, I didn't know about bitfury until people on IRC were talking about waiting for shipping on theirs. Fully keeping up with the threads here could easily be a full time job. But my job as a moderator isn't to police the companies, nor do I have the authority do so. I contribute intermittently as a regular miner, picking and choosing what threads I read and offering my opinion where I fee like it, and when I act as a moderator is usually either because someone has reported a post or I keep seeing one constantly at the top so I decide to start reading it and find that it's gone repetitive, off-topic, or outright animalistic.