Drawing attention to a specific user and their detrimental behaviour

[Tallcat]

I very much agree that it is impossible to foresee all possible behaviors that could occur. For this reason, I do not think that it would be appropriate to do nothing because it was not something that was explicitly warned against. Indeed, as noted above, this has applied to situations in the past (where nothing in writing was explicitly broken), yet action was still taken.

In the current circumstance, it could be easily argued that no 'rule' per se was broken. A solver is free to solve as many puzzles as they like and rate as they see fit. However, in this case, there is a clear, established, and systematic pattern that seems to be done with malice (and extends beyond trying to inflate solve statistics. If that was the goal, why does the solver rate the puzzles at all?) That the user in question seems to have sought out livestreams of puzzle solves as an additional resource for solution codes in cases where solvers are not viable only reinforces this (Saying that 'live streams of solves should be stopped' misses the point). We could spend a lot of time discussing the 'why' someone feels the need to do this, but to me, this is not the relevant point. The established and systematic pattern of a malicious behavior to me violates the spirit of the community.

I certainly can appreciate from the moderators point of view that this is a difficult issue and there may not be a good/perfect solution (and it is perfectly possible that any actions taken could be circumvented down the road). However, I do not think this should be reason to not, at least, consider possible actions at the moment.

Thank you,

Tallcat