The age old debate. This is something which needs to be taken on a case by case basis. To give an example I'll present a number of scenarios and would be interested in what people would do if they were on DefaultTrust. These are just examples and not based on real members of the forum.

User 1
Traded forum accounts back in 2011 but has since displayed above average posts and displayed levels of trust that are considered to be good within the community and has been placed on DefaultTrust.

User 2
Traded forum accounts back in 2015 but has since displayed exceptional posting level and is considered trustworthy by most of the community and is on depth 2 of DefaultTrust.

User 3
Has traded one account but has a average posting level and isn't considered either trustworthy or untrustworthy.

User 4
Has escrowed for forum account sales in the past but hasn't traded forum accounts. This user has exceptional trust level and is on DefaultTrust.

User 5
A hero member now but sold accounts back in 2009 when they were a newbie. No current trust level and doesn't post anything but marketplace listings for various goods relating to men watches.

The idea behind these dilemmas is that people make mistakes and sometimes don't understand the consequences of their actions especially because prior to early 2016 account sales and the ethnics behind it wasn't very well documented and nativity could come into play. As well as it wasn't that frowned upon back then anyway.  Thus the reason I'm only displaying users which have traded forum accounts prior to 2016. Late 2015 and early 2016 the majority mentality towards account sales changed during this time period and resulted in a big crackdown of account sales and resulting in a mass amount of negative feedback being left. Although the intention is good this might have been a little unfair on those that have been trading forum accounts for a number of years and then suddenly get marked red especially considering forum account sales was considered OK during the years they were trading. During a mentality shift there should always be a grace period and past dealings not considered if they accept the mentality shift and change their ways. Remember there are several laws that have been changed in your country are you a criminal because you did something back in 1920 that would have been considered legal at the time but is now considered illegal?

Prior to 2016 some people didn't have a problem with it and some had a slight problem but wouldn't go as far as calling them unethical practices. What I think resulted in the shift of mentality was the increasing problem of signature campaign spammers. Account sales were on the rise due to the fact that signature campaigns were becoming very popular during this time which resulted in people buying accounts to cheat the system and enroll multiple accounts.This is unethical obviously because this was against the rules of the majority of signature campaigns. There were concerns about scamming users because the account is higher ranked but at that time there was no merit system included and the trust system existed which meant that ranking up accounts was easy and shouldn't have had no bearing on trust as well as the fact that an escrow should always be used when dealing with strangers anyway. Of course when a newbie joins the forum and sees a high ranking member they automatically assume they're more trustworthy than a complete newbie which I think a lot of people had concerns about with account sales. Although from my stand point I believe that the trust system should have made that clear and just like selling carving knives its not your responsibility of what they do with those knives and its not your responsibility with the account. Although its not as black and white as that. Now that its quite clearly against the moral stand point of the forum because of the increasing problems it brings it should be the responsibility of the seller too because its quite clear what the standpoint from forum members is on account sales but again this shouldn't really be applied to those when it was an acceptable practice.

 Although its now well documented that account sales is definitely going to get you marked red and almost all account sales are to cheat a signature campaign and possibly scam then rules and regulations should come into play whether thats from a forum point of view or via defaulttrust making some guidelines to account sales.

My opinion is that account sales should not be allowed per the forum rules. However if theymos is not going to do that then DefaultTrust need to start making a guideline. A universal guideline with no exceptions. For example for the users in my example who are trusted I would give the benefit of the doubt when trading forum accounts because it was acceptable at the time but if they continue to do so once this universal guideline has been approved by the majority then their reputation no longer comes into play.

Regarding the shift in mentality if we were to establish a start date to applying universal guidelines of leaving feedback are we going to do the start date from today or january 1 2016 or earlier? If we establish a start date then all past dealings in forum accounts have to be erased don't they?

There's a number of problems with establishing a start date because there has already been 1000s of feedback left and I don't think everyone is going to agree on this controversial subject which would result in inconsistent feedback across the forum. Potentially establishing a start date and then changing all previously left feedback to neutral could be an option. At the moment we've got some self admitted legendary members who have traded accounts but have been left off the hook because of their reputation and I'm fine with that because of the case by case situation this presents but we then have less established members getting marked for the same thing. At the moment the feedback being left is rather inconsistent.