by mystic » Wed Nov 28, 2012 2:44 am
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?
"The real opposite of love is not hate, but indifference" (Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz)