MAINTENANCE NOTICE

[crisipicada]

Thank you for Mystic for making this forum operational well. You are really blessed by ingenuity. Hope that you continue to do good works for the good of the community. More blessings to come.

[Edwin]

mystic has done a wonderful thing for this forum by devising a way to deal with the bad people who were destroying us. As Sir Michael said, this forum was just about to calapse because of spammers and the such, and mystic saved the day for us. We are all thankful that we can get on and post our thoughts, and even though now I copy before I submit, I wouldn't need to because it almost always works. Thank mystic!!!!

[crisipicada]

Yes, that is very true. If there is no Mystic, I do not know what will really happen to this. So again, thanks to Mystic.

[Edwin]

Yes, mystic has been keeping this forum trouble free, and that is very good. He had some ideas on how to eliminate the trouble makers, and that really has saved this forum for all of us. I am afraid without his help the forum would have been in trouble. Thanks mystic!

[mystic]

Thank you, it's just a service to the community.

After some experimentation and the wrong algorithms, I just came up with the right idea which allows to spot out, in a reasonable lapse of time, the people who have multiple accounts. I will make the example of some situation, because I want to ask the opinion of everybody. I am not sure "if" we should apply a censorship or allow certain behaviors, which border with spam, harrassment, and abuse.

The main purpose of this is to find those people who have suspicious activity. For example, if one account was banned and they keep registering new accounts, this is an indication that they might be spammers. Or they might register multiple accounts to trick others (for example introduce themselves as different person to the same person they are interested in, with the apparent purpose of testing him/her, which indeed is just plain harrassment in my idea; or maybe they want to date with multiple persons under a different name and not mess things up, which anyways is not an indication of proper behavior).

But this check does not spare people who behave well and have "legitimate" multiple accounts (despite I would wonder why, or what's the purpose). Indeed, I suspect they are not many, and maybe we can help them merging the accounts.

As an additional point, I will remind that the cleaner the forum runs, the best service Jaderune will give. Multiple accounts require more CPU time, slow down the forum, require more resources. And indeed, the cleaner the forum is and the most authentic the people who use it are, the most valuable this community will become.

Of course, the algorithm would only create the lists of the accounts to check. Each case should be dealt with manually, to avoid to disrupt the service for legitimate users. I'm not saying we have to terminate those accounts. But we could gain more knowledge about who attacks the forum. What do you think?

[Edwin]

I will agree with you mystic that it is good to learn about the people, what kind of people attack the forum, and what their behaviors are. People who behave poorly as to be attacking others on the forum, and then when they are called to give account for their actions, get shut down, and then they start another account, doing the same thing all over again is unacceptable. Mean people, vicious people, and those whose intention is to damage other people on the forum shouldn't be allowed to register under a different name and then continue their destructive behavior. What is good for the forum is good for us!

[mystic]

I'm afraid that my new test algorithm failed miserably

It is too much resource intensive and the database could not withstand the query. Sorry if somebody found the "Out of connection" error in the site.

I have to rethink the algorithm and see what I can come up with. For the moment, all multiple accounts are safe The old algorithm is too approximate to give realistic results.

[Edwin]

It sounds like, mystic, trial and error. You try something, and it works for it doesn't work. Then if it doesn't work then you try something else that you hope will work, and time tells whether that works or not. We appreciate what you are doing for the forum anyway, mystic!

[mystic]

Ummmmmmmm..... trial and error.... that's the problem with marriage too. There should be no trial and error; it should happen just one time and be the right one. But for how much you try to do things perfectly, there is always something that goes wrong. At least for somebody

[mystic]

You are really blessed by ingenuity.

That statement just hit my eye. But what does it mean???