Help Fight Spam
@patrice is fighting day-in and day-out to reduce the amount of spam in our community. She needs our help.
Why is spam bad?
- Spam takes rewards from the reward pool, which could have otherwise gone to Steemians who are making positive contributions to the community.
- Spam uses up space in the blocks, which can reduce the amount of available bandwidth for non-spamming Steemians.
- Spam causes the blockchain size to grow, which increases the costs for everyone running blockchain nodes (witnesses, developers, exchanges, etc.)
- Spam makes it harder for curators to find quality content.
- Spammers are trying to exploit the system by taking rewards without making positive contributions to the community.
- Spam is annoying.
What is @patrice doing to reduce spam?
@patrice is hunting down spam and downvoting it with her bots @mack-bot and @spaminator, to take away rewards from accounts that are spamming.
What do @mack-bot and @spaminator do?
@mack-bot
- Flags account immediately after posting for tracking with minimal vote weight.
- Flags “High Freqency Posters” with a flag heavy enough to hide their posts.
@spaminator
- Follow up flags to remove payouts on posts/comments 6.5 days after @mack-bot
- Flags new accounts found within 12 hours of payout to remove rewards.
What can we do to help?
@mack-bot and @spaminator need SP delegations so that they have enough SP to counter the upvotes being received by spammers. Based on the current amount of rewards going to known spammers, @mack-bot needs 20,000 SP in delegations and @spaminator needs 200,000 SP in delegations.
If this seems like a lot of SP - it is. Think about that though - that is how much SP is needed to counter the upvotes that are currently rewarding spammers! That is a lot of money being paid to spammers, which could otherwise be going to members of the community who are actually adding value.
How to help
You can delegate a portion of your SP to @spaminator or @mack-bot, which will help @patrice counter the abuse.
Here is a post explaining how to delegate using SteemConnect:
How to Delegate SP to another user using the SteemConnect tool from Busy.org
If you don't want to mess with the details in that post, you can just copy and paste these pre-made URLs to delegate specific amounts. To donate to @mack-bot instead of @spaminator, just replace spaminator with mack-bot in the URL.
Note - the amounts may be off by very small amounts (0.001-0.1).
Delegate 20 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=40958.93048%20VESTS
Delegate 50 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=102397.326201%20VESTS
Delegate 100 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=204794.652402%20VESTS
Delegate 500 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=1023973.262010%20VESTS
Delegate 1,000 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=2047946.524020%20VESTS
Delegate 5,000 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=10239730.000000%20VESTS
Delegate 10,000 SP to spaminator
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=20479460.000000%20VESTS
I have personally delegated 5,000 SP to the @spaminator account. Hopefully with all of our help @patrice can reach 20,000 for @mack-bot and 200,000 SP for @spaminator.
Please help out if you can!
If you think @patrice is doing a great job, please remember to vote for her as witness:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Why not ask @blocktrades and @freedom to take a break?
They power about 90% of the reward sucking spam on Steem.
Please, take some time to have a look at the bids for votes.
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Every stakeholder is allowed to do whatever they want with their stake. If certain stakeholders are doing things that are not in the best interest of the platform, then it is up to the other stakeholders to counter whatever they are doing.
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Good point @timcliff you are perfecty right. I notice that Grumpycat do not always practice what it prechaes by always upvoting its comment to the highest order ...Thanks for this post..I will act accordingly.
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yeh this act is necessary for the quality of this platform
@timcliff
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Yeah... Those two really need to take a break, it sucks when spammers get rewarded for the hardwork done my loyal members
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Thanks @timcliff; I didn't realize this had become this much of a problem and I like the idea of supporting @patrice as a witness. Both bot accounts post as well, so members can also make sure to support their posts (reports, etc). I do this with some of @cheetah's posts, though if these accounts power down, they may have less of an impact outside of their delegation. For users who may not be very active or vote much, delegation is one way they can really help.
All users should also consider what posts we upvote. Based on the replenish rate, 10 votes a day on quality material can help this platform too. For a while, I liked the welcoming tag of #introduceyourself, but too many people abuse that tag. Sticking to a niche can help here and make it easy to identify great content.
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I do not closely follow her work, but patrice/spaminator/steemcleaners/mack-bot refrain from engaging checkthisout/grumpycat and berniesanders for all of his platoon of spamming accounts.
These are the 2 worst enemies of the Steem blockchain, with their damages followed by Ned's effort to promote STEEM to spammers by delegating his own stake to suck them in.
What Steemcleaners, cheetah and seraph do is a circle jerk I once defended, but whomever wants to fight spam should fight it, instead of delegating to some dubious players having their own agendas.
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They have clearly defined rules of what constitutes spam, and I don’t believe that they are getting involved with “overpaid” posts and comments unless they are overpaid and spam or abuse.
They also have significantly less SP than what they need to be able to combat the amount of spam that is occurring, which is the main reason for this post.
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So just contact thejohalfiles, freedom, roadscape, ned, adm (is it pfunk?).
dan and blocktrades seem to have surrendered and blocktrades does business as usual.
I checked blocktrades' last 5 pages in steemd before posting this, and not a single downvote.
Your policy of not rewarding yourself full force also worsens the problem, since it seems like you will never have the power yourself, even if you wanted to fight the spam.
Everyone I asked ignored this question:
Is the STEEM blockchain sustainable?
The rate of growth in spam exceeds the rate of technological advance.
You deal with these issues daily, so you should know.
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I don't send requests like this to individuals. It would be considered spam.
I think so. There are some optimizations that will need to be made at some point, and the hardware requirements to run a blockchain node will likely continue to increase, but I believe it will continue to scale.
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Posting it to your audience of followers is not spam, but contacting the shotcallers and asking for help, not for yourself, but for the entire project is spam?
What is your opinion about deletions from the blockchain?
And if a blockchain can not allow them (although I believe it can with a big enough consensus), then hard forks for the mere purpose of deletion if necessary?
And the same questions and answers applied for elimination of stolen rewards (like what should have been done against zeartul) or clear cases of spam (checkthisout/grumpy, bernie and others I read about).
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Yes, sending unsolicited requests to stakeholdres asking them to use their stake in a certain way is considered spam.
Whatever is entered in the blockchain is stored there forever.
It would require a hardfork to do this. I do not currently see any cases where I would personally support a fork to remove any content from the blockchain.
If users follow proper security precautions, their accounts and funds will not be stolen. If users do not follow proper precautions and lose their account or funds, it is not the responsibility of the development team and witnesses to correct their mistake. It actually puts the devs and witnesses in a dangerous position of authority to have that power, as many cases are not black and white, and could even be fraudulent claims.
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Where informing about and asking to fight spam is considered spam, the situation gets to what it came to here.
The zeartul case is a clear enough case of a scam.
I am not well informed about it, but I think he was a pioneer of the "no refunds" policy, and he did get some fraction of an SBD from me, his bot did not vote on, and he refused to refund after I informed him about it and since then I knew not to use it and not to deal with him.
Of course trying to alarm others collectively would have been futile, ignored and considered immature in any case it would have been noticed.
Whose responsibility was the ETC case?
(Why) Does it matter whose responsibility you consider it to be?
Certain acts demand extreme actions, or else psychopathy is rewarded.
It is also burglary victims' fault that they were not sufficiently armed, trained and alert.
If it depended on me, I would have used extreme actions in less extreme cases than zeartul.
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This comment has received a 19.61 % upvote from @steemdiffuser thanks to: @stimialiti. Steem on my friend!
Above average bids may get additional upvotes from our trail members!
Get Upvotes, Join Our Trail, or Delegate Some SP
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I will delegate some Steem power for this cause. I am a minnow and it will not be much, but I have some extra Steem power from investing in Steem last year and transferring it all into Steem power. I still do not have enough to male a huge difference in voting so this seems like a better use!
One question. When you downvote a post, does it count the same as an upvote for using vote power?
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Yes
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Thank you for your support! I appreciate you taking the time to help raise awareness and everything that you do for the community.
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If you leave "yourname" blank it will autopopulate to whatever name they enter on steemconnect.
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=&delegatee=spaminator&vesting_shares=20479460.000000%20VESTS
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Thanks!! I updated the post.
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We learn something new every day :)
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I so appreciate this information and have Upvoted and will Resteem! @patrice works hard to keep Steemit above board. I just discovered yesterday that she’s a witness, so she now has my vote! Keep up the good work!
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These people are really doing a great service to the community as a whole. I notice a blog thatI read (zerohedge) constantly is getting hit be the steem cleaners notices but they still seem to be doing fantastically well with there blog. Is there a further escalation after steem cleaners?
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Not that I am aware of.
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good post
jk, I just found a comment spammer making bank. Spent all my day's voting power flagging them. Spam is a HUGE problem and so happy to vote for both you and patrice!
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Spammers making bank. You're losing bank and new users making nothing and leaving.
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Not quite, flagging returns the rewards to the reward pool so that everyone can share it.
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Ow wow that's cool. None of us humans can flag them down?
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We need these sort of accounts to deal with the abuse. Many people will not flag as they fear retaliation, but others can do it on your behalf
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Right now i am a new user and may not be able to contribute, but i will surely try to do so as soon as i have enough. If all the spammer end up getting all the upvotes then how are we supposed to grow Steem. The new user will leave seeing no earnings here.
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Those characters are adorable!
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Thumbs up for all the ideas that help increase the quality of the Steem blockchain :)
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Thanks Tim
I've been delegating to @spaminator for a while now, but perhaps it is time to beef up the amount, as it was a good Christmas here 😁
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Thanks for sharing what @patrice had been up to - great work.
Just a quick question, I know we want to get these two bots enough Steem power to do their jobs, but how do you undo a delegation setup with your URLs? Do you just repeat the URL and change the
vesting_sharesvalue to 0 (zero)?Just thinking ahead (also, I know you can use vessel (desktop steemit wallet from @jesta) to set/remove delegations)
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Yes. If you delegate
0.000000 VESTSto the account, it will remove the delegation. It will take 7 days to return to your account balance.Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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Thanks for clarifying. I'll delegate something later when I get to my laptop (fiddly phone's not so fun)
Edit: done.
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Great initiative! This is what we need to keep Steemit clean! I like to delegate if I could, unfortunately I'm pretty new here and don't have much SP yet. So maybe I could help by reporting spammers instead. What do you think @timcliff?
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Sounds good! @patrice is the person to talk to :)
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Got it! Does she have a discord channel?
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Not sure. I asked her what the best way to report is. One of us should get back to you with an answer :)
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Thank you. I'll keep an eye out while waiting.
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She is available if you tag her in the #steemitabuse channel of steemit chat or discord.
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Thanks for the reply. I'll make sure to report any spam abuse I see.
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Spammers are really taking away rewards from the pool. Hope that some heavy weight users will delegate their SP to fight this spamming.
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This HAS to be done... I would definitely help if I could, but minnows like me should at least resteem this post and spread the word. Spam is a huge, huge problem on this platform. Spammers do not care about others and they aren't helping this community grow, instead they are ruining it. Sad.
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What does “High Freqency Posters” mean cuz I post on my blog everyother day and I comment down a 3-5x a day? Is that too much?
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It depends on whether they are adding value.
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Okay thanks I feel like they are.
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I'll contribute what I can, because even though I'm just a minnion I see the neccesity of this. Spam is taking over if we don't act.
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Sounds like a solid and selfless initiative ~ shame I only have SP crumbs.
Thanks @patrice @spaminator @mackbot
:(
xox
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Thanks tim cliff for the post. I did not knwk about spammers in steem. There are people who are posting blogs every 10 mins. I thought they are posting quality posts. But it looks like they are slowing down the system by frequent posts.
I hope delegation of SP macbot and spamminator will reduce the load on blockchain and thereby it will help building am healthy community. It is good the few people are really working hard to get rid of spammers..
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So glad I caught this post, really appreciate it when those who know what is happening share. This gives insight into what is going on, learning ways to assist is a bonus.
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Very interesting writing friend, if I may know why this spam can happen? I'm still a little uninformed with this spam. Thank you guys, I am very happy with this you. Because you want to share knowledge with me. It's great to be friends with you.
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People write worthless posts and comments (often using bots) hoping that they will receive upvotes from them. Many upvote their own spam with whatever SP they have to give themselves rewards.
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this is a very nice initiative, i don't think i can do this as of the moment though..but i am voting @patrice as witness. thank you @timcliff, voted you already.
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Haoli beautiful raquelita
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I have joined Steemit few days ago and before i really don't know what is spam here .... i know something new after read the blog ... thanks for sharing a wonderful knowledge and it will help a lot of new peoples ... ahh... i have to learn a lot here ... btw good work ..... thanks again....
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Thank you to all who are helping get rid of spam. The rest of us who benefit appreciate the larger reward pool. I don't have SP to delegate, but I'll do my best to continue producing, promoting, and rewarding quality content.
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@timcliff, true talk. spammers get much reward in the pool, which is so so bad. please watch out...
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I see this problem too :(
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hi @timcliff , sorry im a bit confused , it means we can delegate sp power from @spaminator or @mack-bot, ? and it will help .
i just need to write t their name here instead of your friend s name?
https://steemit-production-imageproxy-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/DQmdtrNFdDHr9T1RNuekhTqJKwMevmbPXjCJiauFc8ZHCeE
i used to try with minnowbooster but still no responce from it .
im confused .
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You can delegate to them to help me fight spam. If you wish to help, @mack-bot needs SP.
Yes, put
mack-botfor the Delegatee.Thank you!
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thank you for your information :) ,
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There's also the other side of the equation. People need to stop supporting the users that use these bots and supporting people like me who do not.
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The two bots listed in this post take rewards away from bots that are spamming and receiving rewards..
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Yeah but humans could unsubscribe from the people who hire the bots.
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This post is actually intended to help with your problem by reducing the rewards that spamming bots are receiving. Your comment seems out of place. Are you fighting against what is in the post or supporting it? Or does your comment have nothing to do with the post?
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Haha...@timcliff, i think @mysearchisover didnt properly understand your post, probably he doesn't know you are against the huge rewards this spammer receive after spamming our beloved community
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I don't like bots. I prefer good humans over good bots.
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I'd prefer not using bots for anything on this site.
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Yes your bots are better. Could this be done manually by a human though if they had enough power?
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Why does that matter?
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I prefer humans on here.
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Why should humans spend their time performing repetitive tasks that could easily be automated?
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Because this is a website for humans.
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The website is just a UI layer that runs on top of the blockchain. The blockchain was actually built to support programmatic interfaces such as bots.
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*i think this is not detail enough to me. I think to me I don't know what spam is, and that should be the starting point. Than telling me the purpose or the result to achieve from it. Thanks
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https://steemit.com/faq.html#What_is_considered_spam_or_abuse
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ok
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this is great investing sir and thanks for sharing this, this is something new to me.
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Hey @timcliff I'm having a problem creating a Steemit account for a friend content creator. The confirmation process is taking 5+ days and still no word. I tried to reach out to you on Steemit.chat but that site does not appear to be working - was unable to successfully create a login. What's the best way to reach you?
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Account approvals can take up to seven days.
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Wow this is great post.
Thanks for sharing it.
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Yeah we needed to now stop spam @timcliff
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informative ,,
resteemed @timcliff
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Hai abishali beautiful name
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hello, thank u ! @caringnikz
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sorry.i dont understand your post..
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Sending links that are unrelated to the topic of discussion is considered spam.
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I'm just sharing with you that I have already approved and wrote up my introduction.
I thought is a social place to share my happiness as i treat you as my Friend and want to thank you.
And thought you will be happy seeing it as well.
So I'm getting wrong meaning of steemit blogging....
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hehe, well glad to hear that you successfully got an account. You should probably read the "etiquette guide" on the welcome page though. Not a huge deal, but there are some general guidelines that are best to follow.
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Alright, I will read again. It's a lot of information to learn. Maybe missed some ...
Thank you..
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