Quote from: suchmoon on Today at 03:39:48 PM

Quote from: alani123 on October 12, 2023, 11:34:05 PM

But if Ratimov is indeed a serial plagiarizer I'm sure a Russian speaker would be more able to tell if this is true or not since he is so active on the Russian subforum.

This has not really about the Russian language. Ratimov was copy-pasting texts that just barely technically didn't qualify as "plagiarism" according to forum rules and/or moderator interpretation but it would have been plagiarism for a reasonable observer. Whether he has done anything like that since then (this was 2-3 years ago IIRC) - I don't know, probably not, he's one of those adaptive sleazeballs except when he flies off the handle and starts attacking people who dare to call him out.

Definitely not DT material but it has little to do with DT members being afraid of him as the useless shitpuppet OP is alleging. If you look at Ratimov's DT1 "sponsors", there is quite a bit of backscratching going on, Russian members supporting him for whatever tribalism they have going on there, and a few others who probably can't be arsed to research whom they have in their trust lists (and arguably shouldn't be in DT1 themselves, I mean Best_Change LOL).

Well, same goes for Ratimov's merits. There's a lot of exchange between Russian accounts on this forum.
Does this mean that it's ill gotten merit? Maybe.
We've said it time and time again that local boards should be encouraged to be more active and merit is a nice incentive. But with all that liberty comes also some responsibility, and back-scratching indeed isn't an ideal scenario, especially if a language subforum isn't really growing but it's just the same members over and over again.

Should there be intervention though? This to me is questionable. Unless there's some serious alt accounting in place I don't see what's going on as particularly harmful.