hypervalent_iodine

I am not responding to the majority of this in accordance with the above mod note as well as due to reasons I have already stated. I will however respond to your first sentence. Unless my text is surrounded by a green or red box, I'm not acting in my capacity as a moderator, I am approaching the thread as a member. Please do not confuse the two.

Really? Seems to me this is about what you assume is my displeasure with the neg rep system based off something that someone told you. This is hinting towards becoming personal, which is why I asked you to defer your questions - which do not seem related to the OP so much as directed at me specifically - to PM. In the meantime, I have answered your questions for you.

No, it is not. This is once again off topic though. I would prefer that you place your baited questions in PM, unless they have relevance to the OP.

And you have proof of this, I assume?

I answered the question you asked of me in the post I quoted. To answer this question, to my knowledge, no I have not. Can I ask you what the relevance of this is to my post?

Just because they don't explicitly justify their reasons to you, does not mean that their reasons are unjustified. They are. We don't neg rep people in place of warning them about rules violations as that is not what the reputation system is for, nor is it an effective way to ask a member not to do something. They are separate systems used for separate tasks, hence I see no relevance in your questions. However, since you are so persistent, no I haven't complained about any neg rep I've received as I can normally figure out why I have received them and I see no reason to call someone out on it or to ask someone else to fix them. If another member happens along and disagrees with the way my posts have been repped, they might take it upon themselves to counter it, but that is entirely their prerogative and it is not something I have ever concerned myself with.

I am failing to see how this might relate to the comment of mine that you quoted.

Because the reputation system and moderation of posts and members by staff are two completely separate things. Bolded mine. This is not true. We sometimes add a small bit at the end of a mod note asking members not to respond in thread, but instead to use the PM or the report feature. The reason for this is simply because responding in thread can massively derail it from the OP, which os obviously not something we want to have happen.

I am far from being a physicist, so I will not comment on specific content here, but I would like to make some more general remarks. The purpose of the Speculations forum isn't to punish OP's and having a thread here doesn't necessarily mean that the content is wrong. It is simply for speculation and for positing ideas that are not always in line with currently accepted science. If you think that you have written a thread containing your own scientific speculations or hypotheses, then this is certainly the place to put it. If you can explain them and back them up, all the better. Happy posting.

Could we perhaps get this back on topic?

! Moderator Note For the benefit of those who replied to the above post, the poster in question has been removed from the site as a spam bot.

! Moderator Note To those that responded to the above quote, which I have removed, the user in question was found to be a spam bot. A very tricky one, but a spam bot nonetheless.

This quote seems fairly pertinent at this point of the discussion.

! Moderator Note Typist, I have removed your post as it appeared to be posted solely for the purposes of advertising your thread, which is not permitted here as per our forum rules.

Exactly what do you mean by organic? If you are referring to this, the DNA compounds they make are still organic macromolecules since they still contain a carbon based framework. I'm not sure if that answers your question or not, however.

! Moderator Note pmb, You were not ignored. Your reports were received and are being discussed. We don't immediately act on all reports for a number of reasons: 1. We're not all here all the time so things aren't often acted upon until one or two mods happen to see a report and comment on it. This is especially true for reports that require a staff member familiar with the theoretical content. 2. More pertinently, we are not here to serve your every whim. We encourage members to report what they think may be a violation of the rules, but it is entirely not your position to say whether it actually is or how a report should be actioned. This post of yours is off topic and is derailing this thread and I am going to ask you to cease this line of conversation here. Additionally, the back-seat moderating is not appropriate and it is to stop. If you have any further questions regarding this mod note, please PM a member of staff or use the report feature.

If you're talking about the COOH protons and not the alpha carbonyl ones, you won't see that proton in the normal range for a proton NMR. You need to extend it to scan up to about 13 or 14 ppm. Are you even sure it's a carboxylic acid? Also, if you need full characterisation, you need to do more than IR and 1H NMR. You should at least get mass spec analysis and a carbon NMR as well. The peak might not even be an OH peak is really what I'm saying. Of it were and it were from the COOH in your product, it would be very obvious. That being said, since your carbonyl peak is small, what you are calling a slightly broad peak might be what you would expect. Forget the IR, in any case. Go get some real spectra

Yeah, I just assumed it was a diamond disk. It's hard to say what it is without seeing what the OP is calling slightly broad vs. very broad. Another thing to consider is minor contamination with some hydroxy containing compound.

Is it possible to attach a copy of the spectra?

I agree to an extent. There are some members who blatantly abuse the system by creating sock puppet accounts to bias the rep points of another member or of themselves. Take this thread for example: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/65663-bulla-the-rainbow-man/ You won't be able to see it, but pretty much every post by bulla in that thread has multiple + rep points from a member and their sock puppet. This is another example: http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/60031-tough-time-brominating-quite-a-basic-ketone/ That OP (from before I was a mod) in a single night created over a dozen sock puppets using proxy IP and repped a bunch of posts by fireoncells and another one of his sock puppets that was used to reopen the thread. Poor Cap'n spent the day (and even a few days after) banning and rebanning sock puppets. Those we try to counteract, but we do not punish people for it. As a member I, as with others here, will also counteract the rep on posts if I don't agree with it. As staff, we may suspend a member for using a sock puppet or for some other reason, but to my knowledge there has been no one suspended or banned for misuse of the rep system. Other than obvious cases such as in the above, it's entirely too difficult to determine if someone is not using it correctly simply by combing through posts, which in itself is a pain and hard to do and keep track of. So we don't do it unless we have to, which isn't often.

And as an added note, I object to you stating you got a message from a moderator. I made it quite clear that my messages to you were in my capacity as a member here and not as a moderator. I do not believe I said a false accusation about me in particular.

I mentioned it on page 1 of this thread, just FYI. And to reiterate what Captain said, mods don't use it to spy on members. I can promise you we have better things to do than comb through posts and check who gave what where. It really serves us no purpose except where some sort of abuse of the system is suspected and even then, going through each post is really a last resort. Certainly the only judgement we make is whether or not the use of the reputation system by a given member is appropriate or not. Other than that I fail to see to what end we might use the added visibility. The reason the software isn't set to allow members to view it is, to my mind, simply because it lends itself to a higher propensity for people to use it to punish or reward individual members and incite flame wars and hostility within threads. Pmb, I have stated to you and restated to you that my comment in the PM was in absolutely no way in reference to you. I am confused as to why you took such offence to it and while this is off topic, I seriously object to you publically making such a blatantly false accusation. If you wish to discuss it more, please PM me or report the message, but either case I ask you as a member to stop dragging it into the forums.

Athena, We were made aware of this particular poster a few days back and have banned her/it and the other alias as a spammer. I am unsure exactly how far the comments spread and definitely was not aware PM's were involved, but you are obviously right to exercise caution and to warn others. Anyone else who did get that message or a profile comment should simply delete it. We do our best to try and circumvent spammers from being able to spam here (Cap'n has the software set to avoid most of them), but unfortunately some manage to slip through the cracks. Thanks again. Edit: I'm going to remove the spam email addresses that I just noticed in the email you copied. Just a heads up.

! Moderator Note raid517, So you know, these sorts of posts are not accepted here. Please refer to section 2 of the forum rules and in future, please do not try to insult other members.

It is about God and therefore belongs in the Religion forum. I don't care for any semantic arguments here. This is simply how SFN chooses to segregate subject matter. The Speculations forum demands evidence or a testable theory as per the rules of that forum. Anything that implicates a God or Gods cannot possibly fulfil this criteria. As such, these types of threads are inherently not suited for such a forum, unless of course you intended it for the trash. And to be clear, I am not trying to stifle conversation here. I am in fact doing the opposite.