The battle is over…

The troll…

Dead…

At least for now… But there is talk that this troll will rise again.

And when he does…

Will we be ready?

You may have recently received an unwarrented flag from the username @r4fken or the bot used to counter his votes @highasfuck.

So for those who may have felt unwelcomed by this flag abuser, I would like to first apologise on behalf of the steemit community.

Who was r4fken?

R4fken introduced himself as a stand up guy.

In the early days he helped police catfish, spam and behaviours many of us here are happy to censor. The first thing he ever flagged being porn tells me he was never against censorship.

But as we know not all cops are good cops, and one day when faced with a catfish about to make over $4K r4fken got tired of being that stand up guy and resorted to a little blackmail.

You have to laugh because if you didn’t you’d probably cry.

Not only did he attempt to blackmail, but he also let this catfish get away with over $4000.

Despite what r4fken did he was not completely shunned by the community and though he was caught by those who could have destroyed his reputation then, he was treated with mercy. (Probably because they pitied his idiocy)

But r4fken didn't stop there.

If r4fken were to return under another account name it would seem it would not be for the first time.

There was once a sweet looking lady named @caitlinm here on steemit who appeared to be a very good friend of our dear r4fken. We know this because she seemed to like to send him all her $teem Dollars.

...a good friend indeed was caitlin.

IF THAT'S YOUR REAL NAME

as it turns out it isn't.

The lady in the photo above is actually called Beatriz.

Welcome my friend!
My name is Beatriz and I will take a selfie holding a sign with your name and little cute draws :D >.<

^ Taken from the link to this gig

The account used to purchase this gig was this one

which was used to give a review to this writer

only days after writing this post.

We have @reneenouveau & @pfunk to thank for realising the fraud of caitlinm, but we have @anyx to thank for connecting the account to @r4fken.

What happened next?

What do you do when you have nothing to lose after losing everything?

Go crazy?

What followed was a series of randomly selected victims (mainly noobs) for unwarrented flagging in an attempt to attack the steemit community and take revenge for being censored by the cheetah bot which made him ineligible for rewards.

The damage r4fken caused was mostly just confusion and discouragement for many new users who were unaware of the circumstances behind his attack. This is because he was just a dolphin. A whale can crush a dolphin and so it did.

But anybody could be as villainous as r4fken. What would be the damage if a whale were to enter our community and behave as carelessly as he did?

Sure it costs a lot to be a whale...

But if you know how much money World of Warcraft makes on cosmetic items for the game, then you'll know that people will spend wackjob amounts of money to keep playing a game they enjoy.

And considering the way he reacted to his censorship, r4fken must have really enjoyed this game.

Why did it take him so long to get bored?

Heck it took me 2 years to give up Farmville I wouldn't be too quick to think this is the end...

Is he really gone?

We can argue that eventually he'll get bored and give up, but in reality even if he does there are others like him out there.

How do we prepare ourselves for the return of r4fken, or even anybody who might treat the platform as belligerently as he did?

• Firstly, we need to be able to better manage plagiarised content:
  Learning How to Spot Spun Content
  Using Machine Learning to Fight Plagiarism

• Secondly, we need to go back and talk about an idea brought up by @dantheman many weeks ago.
  I wouldn't dare speak of this idea without also providing the rebuttal.

Negative Voting

To my understanding, the idea would be that at a cost to the curating powers of their own SP anybody can mute the curating powers of somebody else with an equal amount of SP. For example, if I have 5000 SP and you have 1000 SP I can mute your voting powers so that I can now only use 4000 of my SP for my curation.

Understandably, people don’t like the thoughts of having their voting powers revoked.

The greatest issue is the cost simply isn't high enough.

I have just ONE suggestion to make it more difficult to mute somebody elses vote, but I believe this idea is still limited and there still needs to be a higher cost to muting other voters with your own vote.

You have a reputation to uphold

If the ability to mute a voter only came into effect once the voter lost their reputation, then we would have been able to revoke r4fken and all the sockpuppet accounts of his from both curating for more $teem Power and flagging for pointless revenge. There are improvements to be made also to the reputation system itself, which means in its current form, it may be too easy for one user to destroy the reputation of another in order to revoke their voting privileges. Ideally, reputation could only be seriously damaged if many users of high $P and/or reputation were to willfully crush the reputation of the abuser together.

TL:DR

How rude.

• Just know that the flagging of r4fken and highasfuck was nothing personal or against what you had written.
• r4fken has claimed to have left the building but in reality he likely holds a number of sock puppet accounts.
• We need to have a better way to deals with villains like r4fken. Each godzilla was bigger than the last.

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If this post makes a significant amount, a portion of the rewards will be divided between @reneenouveau, @anyx & @pfunk as I do not wish to take credit for the great work they did.