So some days ago mprep posted this:
Due to the amount of spam which is beginning to cause trouble particularly in this thread I have to put this out:
Warning to all posting in this thread or any other, especially alternate cryptocurrency, thread: Anyone posting in this thread or any other thread useless replies, such as "to the moon", "color the moon", "I like this coin", "Very good", "Done", "Waiting" etc. has a risk of getting their account banned. The thread owner has already stated not to post addresses. You have been warned.
You could say that this is a reasonable waring and I'm not going to disagree with that. But it wasn't until today. Myriads of accounts started getting banned without any personal warning or any given reason.
Spam, insubstantial posts is the message you'd get if you were banned today. Most of the forum's frequent contributors are currently banned! I don't know if this was a global decision from the staff's part or if mprep is doing this for his own reasons but anyhow. Let me just point out some facts for the sake of the forum's well being.
mprep is the only staff member to use a paid signatureHe has more than 4000 posts with his account and most of them are rarely contributing to the community in some way.This makes the staff look bad. I know that there are people in this forum that have helped the community become what it is today. I don't know if it's too late to revise the bans because maybe the damage has already been done. But other forum staff should be aware of this and take apropriate action. In my humble opinion people like mprep are not loyal and suitable enough to hold such a position in this forum. Removing him from the staff would be the least that could be done right now.
But whatever the case is. The fact that mprep is being paid to post while most of his posts are in fact
useless makes this whole situation ridiculous. If it wasn't him banning people then why would he be the one to put out a warning regarding spam while he's the single most "spammy" staff member?
EDIT: As quoted below, a post from BadBear
Yeah there's a ton of garbage being posted in off topic lately. I suspect it's paid sig spammers giving themselves threads to reply to.
I've suggested posts in off topic shouldn't count towards post count.
Hmm, not sure if the people behind the bots are from the paid sigs or not, but a lot obviously just jump at the chance to post something in a nonsense thread as soon as it's posted. Maybe having certain boards that don't affect your post count would cut the down the spam a bit, but I think it'd also just move a lot of it to somewhere else and we'll then see stupid discussions in the politics section or whatever.
I think we should disable the postcount feature entirely, don't you think ? We have activity , that should suffice.
I've actually suggested that too in the past, but it would still be relatively easy to determine posts, knowing there are 20 per page. I've resigned myself to the fact that we're going to have start banning people, didn't want to but it's getting out of hand. Banned a dozen this morning alone (1 week/2 week duration to start), with a dozen more under review, and I'm just getting started.
It seems like BadBear handled out the bans for all members other than newbies. The points he makes are fair, but here's what frustrates me:
- He gives no warning before he bans people
- There are no clear guidelines on how not to get banned meaning that anyone would be banned without any given warning or reason
If BadBear wants a personal all out attack against signature campaign participants he can have it. But to me, this should not be the way to solve his personal issue. Given the above, he is able to ban anyone at anytime for any reason he thinks is apropriate. And that's something that shouldn't happen that easily.
He's just baning accounts by following his own opinion blindly. Do you really believe that he should be able to ban people just because he hates the fact they're participating in a signature campaign?
Final edit: You can see and judge for your own. There was some quite good discussion below. I'm going to leave the previous posts/edits above as is just for the record. But one last thing before I'm out. A warning would have also been taken seriously as well. But in fact, no warning was sent to any user because from what the situation seems to be like, the goal of the temp bans was to spread chaos and fear and make people scared to post more of what some members of the staff consider spam.