I was looking at the ban list and I noticed that many of them are sockpuppets(different accounts of same user) of original users who had been banned. Couldn't the IP simply be banned or are the users simply using multiple access points(I am a customer of IP.Board so I am assuming that users can be IP banned)?

 

 

What if the IP is a school with some good guys and some bad?

What if the IP is a school with some good guys and some bad?

This is the problem with banning by IP address or range. Those of us who routinely connect from behind a proxy server (such as myself) may find ourselves banned because someone else on the same network is a jackass.

What if the IP is a school with some good guys and some bad?

 

That, and a lot of the time the IP's don't match at all; they might fall within the same range or they might be completely different. It's actually not that common for a member to create a sock puppet that has an exact IP match to their original account.

 

IP's are only a portion of what we look at to determine sock-puppetry and usually we can only look to see if they resolve to the same place. Often it's a combination of that, posting style / habits, profile information and other tidbits of personal information that they leak into the forum that lets us know if we're dealing with a sock-puppet or not. I think we do a pretty good job of finding them, though admittedly it sometimes takes a month or so for it to click.

 

Moral of the story is that unfortunately, specific IP bans won't help us very much and banning IP ranges is unfair on others who use an IP in the same range.

 

That, and a lot of the time the IP's don't match at all; they might fall within the same range or they might be completely different. It's actually not that common for a member to create a sock puppet that has an exact IP match to their original account.

 

IP's are only a portion of what we look at to determine sock-puppetry and usually we can only look to see if they resolve to the same place. Often it's a combination of that, posting style / habits, profile information and other tidbits of personal information that they leak into the forum that lets us know if we're dealing with a sock-puppet or not. I think we do a pretty good job of finding them, though admittedly it sometimes takes a month or so for it to click.

 

Moral of the story is that unfortunately, specific IP bans won't help us very much and banning IP ranges is unfair on others who use an IP in the same range.

It is weird how people will go to such lengths just to piss people off. Sometimes I question humanity...

It is weird how people will go to such lengths just to piss people off. Sometimes I question humanity...

 

I think it is the price we pay for having people who would go to great lengths to help people, to find that observational anomaly, to get that poem just right...

 

We could all be in the middle of a very sharp bell-curve - all mediocre. Or we could be smeared out with massive variations and huge tails on both sides of the distribution.

It is weird how people will go to such lengths just to piss people off. Sometimes I question humanity...

 

I've never looked at it that way before. I always assumed it was more laziness. The same laziness that leads some people to skip over all that tedious studying of science can sometimes lead them to inventing other people who will agree with their less than rigorous ideas.