When you joined the site, no one stood in your way. Now you have politely said BP is obnoxious with your grievances spelled out to justify your departure no one will stand in your way. I have been a member for many years. I knew the time babypips changed from their old look to the current one. I will continue to be a member as long as there is babypips and God willing. The love I have for the community blinds me to the imperfections of its operations. Babypips has had, and continues to have, a large scale ripple impact in the world of forex trading that their unwavering commitment to your development cannot be denied. By being a member, it is one of the ways I express my appreciation for their free services and free tools of learning. Expressing dissatisfaction at something is one thing, but hanging onto that dissatisfaction as your reason to discontinue your membership is just not tenable especially where the issue in question is not something that obstructs your participation and discussions, does not threaten you in any way, and it is just one of those things we have to put up with as a reality in our cyberspace. Wish you greener pastures at whatever forum you decide to pitch your tent.
This, exactly.
What are the general consensus on this topic?
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A major problem that has affected your membership.
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A minor problem that does not affect your membership in any way.
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You don’t see or hear the problems the OP mentions.
I’m sure the people (mostly now listed as “Anon123456xyz” and similar names) who have left over the last few years for these exact reasons, often saying so at the time, will all rejoin the forum just to answer you.
Clever question. 
I’m in between with this issue being 2. A minor problem and 3. Not seeing the problem.
It doesn’t directly impact my use of the site and I haven’t received inbox spam from it.
I’m somewhat desensitized to low quality content so I don’t scrutinize posts that closely as I scroll past them.
Let’s be honest, many real people create low quality posts that are better suited to be a search query or add very little value in this era of social media grade written content where complete sentences are a lost art.
However, if it drives away the real members that add value to the community, the result is an indirect but major impact on the utility of this community.
Is @maria_fp actually @Pipsteroid and are they both @flamingoproxy?
This disgruntled member seems to be obsessed with this forum and can’t leave it while claiming to leave it.
It’s possible that @WeRideAtDawn is also another account created by this disgruntled member.
What’s more likely?
One person has been behind this campaign to get the moderators to do something about the bots and click farms.
Or it’s an incredible coincidence that these four accounts have been zealous about this issue for the past few months since flamingoproxy said goodbye.
Either way it creates good engagement and entertainment that no bot or click farm can ever reproduce. 
Omg that’s the third member I’ve been alluding to in my previous posts!!! I didn’t want to “accept” it because @flamingoproxy was so nice to me and I did enjoy our conversations but towards the end he did sound extra disgruntled and also wrote a goodbye post.
For a while I thought I was going crazy thinking I was the only one who could see this pattern lol.
If this is indeed the case though (which I 99% think it is), it’s a lot of effort to be maintaining several accounts just to make a point that this place sucks. Straight pettiness but hey, this could also be a source of entertainment for this person.
Hey, if this is true then I’m okay with that, as long as one of them sticks around because I value good trading advice.
But now I’m starting to wonder who I am. Could I also be @flamingoproxy, or perhaps I’m @ponponwei!
You’re right. It doesn’t take much to amuse small minds.
I think you’re all ICT.
I’ve seen lots of ppl leave over the years, some banned, some giving no reason, some (I’d guess most) realizing that the market is not a money making machine.
BP is a business, and the shock is that it has to make a profit - else it won’t continue to exist - just like all businesses.
Part of the business model is traffic - and we members form part of that traffic, we pay only with our time.
What do we get in return for our time?
Perhaps a sense of community, maybe even some of our questions answered, then again a chance to input ideas.
I’d say none of these - my guess - a weird sense that we nerds who enjoy the world of trading are not alone 
His/her posting pattern is consistent.
Hi Clint,
I see Michael has a site up and running - back to no charge which is good, tho’ likely has made some past cpl of years.
Haven’t much viewed what he has to say but i take the nay sayers with a pinch - might have a look in again.
Anyways take care - big year for you guys up ahead - pity M.P. not in the race but is what it is.
Leftist too lefty to be right, and rightist too righty to be left.
- Left
- Right
- Liberal
0 voters
Cheers to a new week everyone! 
Wrong thread
Pipstradamus here.
I’d like to start simply by saying “Welcome!” and “Happy New Year!” Glad to see so many familiar faces here having a chat.
Regarding some of the comments made above, and reiterating statements we’ve made in the past, we have never paid for traffic, forum users, or posts in the manner described. We don’t employ bots willing. We don’t pay for bots. We don’t pay a company in some corner of the world to post in our forums as bots or as humans.
As @peterma stated, we are a business, and from a business perspective, we have absolutely everything to lose and nothing to gain if we utilize such techniques. For one, Google’s search and ranking algorithms/crawlers are super smart. They can identify paid contributions, link farming, backlink networks, and all levels of black-hat tactics. As you might expect, like most businesses around the world, we depend on our reputation and clean bill of health as far as Google is concerned. We would never risk our rankings, as doing any of the aforementioned things could result in our company being demoted into oblivion. Paid writing services tend to operate internationally, and the topic of finance requires advanced writers with exposure and experience in trading. That’s extremely difficult to find and super expensive to create content or buy users at scale.
Now on to the bots and “low-value” posts. Yes, bots are a problem. We’ve been working with our platform provider to create higher barriers for bots to climb to get registered and verified. Some have worked in the past, but it’s an arms race. It often feels like one step forward and two steps back regarding the different security and moderation systems we’ve deployed. With technology evolving by leaps and bounds, technology providers are always playing catchup.
As for some of those barriers we’ve created (which are not a secret),
- we perform speed checks at registration - if you’re registering in under 10s, you’re most likely a bot. Those accounts get flagged, but not blocked altogether, as this system isn’t foolproof.
- We filter known spam/malware IPs.
- We block new registrations from post links and URLs
- We block certain IP blocks and regions known for illicit activities.
- We block certain email domains we know are used by spammers
- We block certain web hosts that have lax rules regarding who they allow to use their networks
- And we do our best as human moderators to review most topics and replies as they come in. To get the clearest picture of bot behavior, it often requires that our team wait for the account in question to build a profile, posting history, and friends list that we can manually review, compare, and decide whether all these interactions are “natural”. That’s extremely time-consuming.
Regarding low-value, chatGPT-type posts, these posts, and users in general, are sometimes difficult to identify as real or bot. We do our best to qualify the content as valuable or not to the community, and we relay that to the user via PM. We do this for multiple reasons, primarily to see if we get a reply, and secondarily to have the user make changes to the post. Normally, we get a reply and are confident that the user is human, but he might not be great at writing on his own. Or she uses a translation service which doesn’t always come across accurately. It’s these types of interactions that build a profile of a user, but this also takes time to form and then later review.
We’ve always taken a more flexible approach in our moderation efforts as opposed to a heavy-handed approach often requested by a vocal minority. We give members second chances to clean up posts, as you’ll sometimes see a once-public post disappear and then reappear with edits made. Sometimes those edits aren’t good enough, the post gets reflagged, and it’s at this point the message gets deleted by our mod team because sufficient changes weren’t made. Sometimes the user is also removed for repeat offenses. But again, this process is not as timely as some members would like. We know this is frustrating, but it’s the system we have, and it works.
The best thing you can all do to help us in our moderation efforts is to flag any post you feel needs reviewing. Flag the post, select a flag category, or give us a little note about why you think this post warrants additional attention. All flags get checked. If we deem there’s an issue, we’ll act accordingly. Another thing you can do if you come across a member who’s not providing you value is ignore them, literally and figuratively. Add them to your Forums Ignore List, or just keep scrolling down the page.
We don’t ever like seeing members leave because of shortcomings on our end. We’re transparent in what we do, but sometimes that isn’t good enough, and that’s understandable. It’s at that point that we say we probably aren’t what you’re looking for and you should move on.
All we can say is that moderation is difficult and time-consuming. We ask for your patience and understanding that we’ll continue to work on and refine our registration and quality-control systems and processes, and hopefully, that will help enhance the quality standards you expect from us.
Please reach out if you have any questions or concerns.
Pipstradamus
We appreciate your response and understand that it is impossible to be perfect in a imperfect world, but all Babypips can do is keep striving to be the best forex forum.
I was sad to see @flamingoproxy leave. He was helpful and supportive with me during the few interactions I had with him.
I’m still having a hard time accepting that such a valued member of the community who made significant contributions to the forums turned into the very thing he wanted to get rid of. He outdid the bots by creating fake accounts and spamming the forums with his personal crusade.
Some members said that they want him to come back, but I hope he stays away for good. I can’t trust someone who seems to care more about being right and getting his way than he ever cared about the community.
Yes, this is exacty it. I can understand being frustrated because after all, he is spending time out here giving advice etc. but the way he was writing his messages towards the end and even as you can read here from @maria_fp is just full of hate and toxicity. Like an unhealthy fixation on something because like you said, he can’t seem to get his way and is absolutely certain he is right - an ego issue.
He had a lot of valuable trading advice for everyone but it seems he’s quick to get impatient. I doubt he’ll come clean about this and will probably continue to deny he ever had multiple accounts. His last resort will be to leave for good or “leave” and come back as yet another account until his anger over how this place is run takes over again and then the cycle continues lol.