Tony Chan was a frequent contributor to BH SE. He is now banned network wide. It looks like his ban started Nov. 19th, when a bunch of his questions were upvoted. What happened? Anyone know?
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2For more information please see the Meta post from that event, Why has my reputation score suddenly changed?– Steve can help ModJun 1, 2022 at 12:14
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3 Answers
There isn't much we can say publicly about suspensions. But, the decision involved all of the moderators here, plus staff and included the network and information moderators and staff have access to.
It wasn't any unilateral decision from anyone. Of course it was done under the rules governing the action that was taken.
When stuff like this happens, it usually means that publishing the details could give serious rule breakers an inside edge on how to do a better job of evading them.
Asking is always good. If you ever see anything big like that, feel free to ask or to even ask staff.
You have read why Tony Chan was banned, in the topic Why has my reputation score suddenly changed?, but the question leading to this should be: Why did it happen? How could a man create a hoard of many fake profiles to gain points here? The answer lies in the increase of low quality users inevitably being allowed by this site after all the expert level users had seemed to have disappeared a few years ago. This need to balance the low quality questions with sufficient number of users to generate traffic is a tricky business. It wouldn't have happened if low quality questions were not allowed such as Tony's and many others today, coz expert level users would be less likely to commit the fraud. The case of Tony resulted in some people questioning many other active users due to their cheap quality posts, like the world have known that almost half of the twitter followers of Biden were fake bots. It is a compromise that we have to deal with when we allow cheap quality QAs.
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I have cancelled your down-vote with my up-vote. Are you implying that the site has lost its way recently, and that other users were part of the Tony Chan fraud?– BagpipesJun 21, 2022 at 18:33
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Tony was alone in making fake profiles. I doubt he had other friends working as team, it will be purely speculation. The site has lost real expert users many years ago about 2017, you can see that from old posts. Whatever maybe the reason, perhaps mass boycott due to policy, moderation change or for inclusion of cheap quality users etc. Jun 22, 2022 at 3:11
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Thanks for your feed-back. I just cannot understand why Tony would make these fake profiles. What was there to gain?– BagpipesJun 22, 2022 at 18:38
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Yes i understand the points bit but to cheat on the, " Word of God", is the part i do not understand. Obviously he did not fear the Lord when he was cheating which makes me think, did he actually know the Lord. Numbers 32:23 comes to mind. " “But if you fail to do this, you will be sinning against the LORD; and you may be sure that your sin will find you out".– BagpipesJun 23, 2022 at 17:56
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that's hardly cheating on Gods word, it was merely selfish desire, which is not a big deal. All religious hypocrites are guilty of worse sins in their corrupt pride and false judgment, bias, and falsehood. Jun 24, 2022 at 10:02
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That is very true. I should remember Luke 6:41- “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? The situation seems clearer to me now. Thanks for your feed-back.– BagpipesJun 24, 2022 at 16:03
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The point system creates inevitable desire to gain points, we all want more points, so it should be understood easily. Jun 24, 2022 at 16:05
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4As a quick comment, many of us cut back our participation on this site in part due to content quality issues such as not respecting the mode of discourse (see hermeneutics.meta.stackexchange.com/a/886/423 ). However, a bigger issue was StackExchange changing their code of conduct in a way that violates our conscience by censoring and dictating beliefs. See, e.g., christianity.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6718/… along with moderators on many SE sites that quit.– DanNov 27, 2022 at 7:14
Update:
The suspension period has reached its end. Across the Site Moderators and Community Moderators, the consensus is that a proportionate penalty has been completed, and so the user is welcome to continue participating on the network. The expectation is that from point forward there will be no further issues, and as always the team will monitor any further activity.
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@ Steve can help, I did not see that you did an edit on the update and cut out the "We welcome the user back" and inserted " Together with the Community Moderators," . Who are the others that are "Together", with the Community Moderators? I mean was there a vote taken on this that i may have missed.Thanks again.– BagpipesNov 26, 2022 at 13:14
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1@Bagpipes apologies, the spaces in your tag meant I didn't receive any notifications for this, if you just remove the spaces next time it should work fine. I've amended the post further for clarity - user suspensions are not a matter for communities to vote on. Please be assured that we do not take any decisions lightly, continue to exercise all due diligence possible, and will always do our best to uphold the Code of Conduct and represent the interests of the community as a whole as best we can.– Steve can help ModNov 28, 2022 at 10:09
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Tony's profile seems to have been deleted. Is this an update on his suspension that you people deleted his profile or he did it himself? Jun 17, 2023 at 13:33
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@Michael16 “you people”, interesting choice of words. Sorry, we can’t give out how a user’s profile came to be deleted. But, we can tell you that there has been a lot of careful discussion on this that involved more than just us moderators. We did not take any action on this alone, though we all agreed on what we did decide.– Jesse ModJun 19, 2023 at 4:43