Lower Unregistered Chatbox Removed

As you will have already noticed, I have removed the previous "lower unregistered chatbox". If you have been following this blog every day, then, you will already know the reasons.

For those of you who don't, my original purpose in setting the chatboxes was a positive one, and it still is. Amongst other things, it is to promote a positive learning environment, to promote constructive discussions of mutual topics of interests, etc. However, it is clear especially in the last fortnight, that it has not only failed to achieve any of these positive objectives, but instead fostered destructive comments.

One individual, who called himself by various names - "snail", "lansi", and later morphed into respected members of the above boxes by calling himself "newbie", "bullbear", etc. - was very persistent in "spamming". He has been spamming persistently - nearly everyday over the last fortnight, as well as in the past. Each spam typically blocks out the entire conversation of the chatboxes with multiple comments of the same message, sometimes up to 20(!) identical comments to completely block out the chatbox, leaving only his spam. This typically happens at least once a day, sometimes twice or even three times a day! Over the last fortnight, easily 80%-90% of the entries are his alone.

I don't keep a copy of the contents of the spams. Suffice to say they are destructive and in no way useful if one is genuine to seeking improvement to his investing results.

Actually, I thought that some of the spam contents could have been interesting topics of discussions. I invited him to discuss rationally several times. He would ignore and sometimes, even increase the intensity of the spam, personal attacks and verbal abuse.

Everyone in both chatboxes tried to ignore him, but his persistence in spamming eventually got some fed up. Attempts to tell him to stop fell on deaf ears. Kind and generous advices were ignored and received intensified abuse. A few - perhaps out of desperation - gave him a small dose of his own medicine. That made it worse and created a war. If you think I was describing a verbal warzone, you would not wrong - the words used by and to describe lansi are crude and disgusting to say the least.

Whilst I am appreciative of the many supporting comments and attempts to return the lower cbox to sanity, it had become tiring and impossible for everyone.

Chances were given many times to stop or discuss rationally. Finally, after the most patient trying attempt, last night, I let him decide whether he want to stop or face the consequences (that the cbox would be removed if he continued his antics).

When I logged in this morning, he chose to continue his irresponsible behaviour without care nor regard to the rest of the online community. Hence, I had no choice but to remove the chatbox. It is a real shame that he had chosen to do this.

Notwithstanding this, the person is still most welcome to present his views here. All he has to do is to register with me to chat at the top chatbox. And I can still be contacted on my email - fusion.investor@gmail.com - as stated above. I would urge him to be respectful to everyone there. Basically treat others how you would like to be treated. Certainly, irrational and irresponsible behaviour has never been, and will never be acceptable nor welcomed in this blog.

Take care and happy trading!

Comment Moderation

Dear all,

If you have been following investssmart chatbox over the last few months, you may know that I was originally quite reluctant to blog. A key reason is because I didn't want to be distracted from doing what I love doing which is researching under-valued stocks and making profitable investments. Writing a post takes time ... reading, thinking and responding to comments by people with clearly other motives is simply a waste of everyone's time, besides reducing my own clarity of thought and distracting me from making the right and timely investment decisions. As a retiree, I simply have no wish to deal with nor argue with clearly stubborn people with other motives.

As a result, I have reluctantly decided to apply comment moderation. This means that before you'll see any comments posted here, it needs to be approved by me first. My criteria for posting a comment is simple. If I feel the comments are genuine, relevant and made in the interest of wanting to know more about the topic, then, it'll be posted. It might take some time, because I don't always check this blog nor my email but I will try to do so regularly. If I am slow to post a comment, my sincere apologies, but sadly, it is a fact of life that all it takes is just one rotten apple to spoil the entire basketful. Personally, I believe in quickly discarding that bad apple as soon as possible.

I hope comment moderation will not stop the genuine readers from commenting a valid view, even if their views are opposed to mine. My personal observations, inspired by Soros is that I too am also fallible, and I sincerely believe that one learns more when one listens and carefully consider opposing views .

It is possible I could be mistaken in my judgement. Hopefully, there will be few and far between. I normally give the initial comment the benefit of the doubt. However, where I see a 2nd recurrence, I will not hesitate to act.

As you can see, I clearly dislike moderating comments - it's simply extra work for me. But in view of recent experiences, I believe this is necessary, to save me time in the long run, and allow me to post many other numerous topics that I feel will be beneficial to like-minded individuals.

Hopefully this will improve our blogging experience going forward.

Thank you for your kind understanding.

Regards,
Seng.