This is an official apology and explanation to user kimziv
AKA: @chengliang AKA: @yzec
TL:DR Kimzivs account was accidentally deleted by me and in the interest of transparency this is how it happened.
What happened:
On August 12th:
Discourse forum software auto-flagged account “kimziv” as a spammer for reposting an entire article from medium; the article was promotional material for another coin. If a user “types too fast” (ie: copy/pasting promo material) it is automatically flagged as spammer behavior and sent to the Mods review que.
It is common to see ICO promotions and online Casino spam several times a week with this same flag. I saw this flag in the Mod que and hit the “delete spammer” button without much thought. This happens many times a day. The “delete spammer” button removes all posts from a user and also deletes the account.
On August 20th:
This is posted by new user @chengliang claiming that thier and other accounts had been deleted.
It is at this point in time that I should have dug through the last few weeks logs to find what had happened to the kimziv account. This was a big error on my part because I failed to do due diligence
I and the other Mods saw this post and upon discussion we concluded that it was not accurate because permanent bans for regular users will go through the normal Moderation process and be permanently suspended if found in violation, not deleted.
@sonya closed the thread for creating a new account (to bypass a previous ban) and general rudeness.
August 23rd:
New user @yzec (with the same IP address as @chengliang ) posted again claiming that there are users who are being shadow deleted without explanation.
At this point I was admittedly a bit irritated that they were now bypassing two previous bans by creating sock-puppet accounts with the same IP and were implying some sort of conspiracy to hide thier comments. So I posted my objection to thier accusations as untrue, and called them out for using a sock-puppet account, and they responded with:
After which, I posted a (redacted) screenshot of thier sock-puppet account IP and banned the @yzec account.
But something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel that this was the whole story. I decided to go through the logs for the entire month to see if I could find anything about “kimziv” that might explain what was going on.
That’s when I found my mistake
It is 100% my fault that user kimziv was accidentally deleted in the first place. I did not spend the proper time looking at the post history of users caught in the spam filter. I clicked the delete spammer button too quickly. I sincerely apologize to kimziv (aka @chengliang ) for this error it is my fault this happened.
As partial remediation, chenglaing s account has been restored to normal status. Unfortunately I cannot un-delete the previous kimziv account which had about 8 posts on it.
What I have learned:
The moderation team has to deal with several spammers per day and spam filter cleaning does not go through the normal Moderation process. Therefore it is very important that I spend more time to thoroughly review these auto-flags before hitting the “delete spammer” button.
I also apologize to the broader Zcash community for my mistake and will work to be sure it doesn’t happen again.