Question Is the moderator of this forum also the owner of the humanmicrobes.org domain? If so, that seems like a conflict of interest.

Yes, I created and run both.

I'm just some disabled guy trying to find a cure for himself and society. You're welcome to use the donors I find. I'm not trying to sell you anything.

It became clear to me over a decade ago that FMT was the most promising solution, but I didn't know anyone healthy enough, and all the other sources of FMT were terrible and expensive. I was just one disabled guy with no money or expertise in doing anything like this. So I tried to start up community projects to get everyone to chip in and we all share the rewards.

That "oh no he controls everything" is FUD that was started by the Microbioma.org group after dozens of accounts they made to spread disinformation all got banned.

You can look through this history to understand how all of this came to be, and how transparent everything has been, and how things changed along the way:


When the Microbioma.org group demonstrated themselves to be serial liars and fraudsters, I delayed the "opening" of Human Microbes, expecting the community to work to shut them down. I only "opened for business" after people urged me to, and much to my dismay, no one took action against Microbioma, and people continue to fund them and their subsequent terroristic behavior to this day. I was seriously considering banning anyone from buying from HM who used Microbioma.org because they're funding a group of crooks that is harming the effort to acquire high-quality donors for us all. If I had known that people would just ignore their behavior and keep funding them and allowing them to retaliate against people who helped expose them I may have never made Human Microbes's donors available to start with. I've still been seriously considering shutting down HM until people put a stop to this.

I find it absolutely nuts that people are continuing to trust this extremely sketchy source of a potentially deadly medical product. Especially when there are a plethora of public warnings & information, and better alternatives. Then when they get worse and develop new problems they shrug it off as no big deal, and do nothing to warn others or prevent it from continuing to happen. It is such bewildering behavior. I'm more upset that they're getting scammed and harmed than they are..... Like are these even real people?!?

If you read through the history above it should be crystal clear that there is zero valid concern about me biasedly censoring anyone. Like most of what is drummed up by the Microbioma.org group, it's completely absurd and baseless. But that doesn't seem to matter. They just continually spew absolute nonsense and plenty of people who don't know better eat it up. There have been people who said "I don't care to read that history", then went and used Microbioma.org and got worse and developed new problems. I'm done losing sleep over those kinds of people hurting themselves. But I do not forgive them for funding a terroristic group.

Concerns about "unbiased modding" aren't exclusive to situations where a forum is run by someone working in the field. Most of the best and most popular tech forums are run by people who work in the field. Most of Reddit (and other similar sites), for example, is entirely untrustworthy and manipulated by anonymous mods, most of whom push a personal agenda. And that's not to mention all the anonymous accounts spreading misinformation and disinformation. It's amazing how people keep going to Reddit for info and advice as if it's some trustworthy place to get unbiased info.

Regarding "a solution", there is the possibility of the community crowdfunding a paid mod or auditor. I'm open to taking on volunteer mods, but I've modded a variety of different communities and it's extremely difficult to find volunteer mods with good judgment. The vast majority of people who are willing to mod for free either manipulate content per their personal biases, or they're incompetent and have bad judgment.

I think I can give trustworthy members of this community access to the mod logs. On reddit it was easy to give everyone access until reddit disabled the feature. On reddit I also recruited members of the community to be mods so there was full oversight of all actions and communication. I can certainly do that here as well.

If I'm able to find a super-donor I expect the traffic here to dramatically increase far beyond what I can personally handle. It may be necessary to hire moderators at that point.
 
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