I was just curious how administrators knew that people were clones. I know you can track the IP but what if they sign up as a different user name and different information on a different computer?
All cloning is traced by the persons' IP or or email address. If the person has a different IP, there are still ways to find out their a clone such as similar typing styles and such.
So basically if somebody who's been banned who signs up again on a different computer and uses completely different information and acts differently...there's no way to tell?
There's many ways to find out, I'm the banning expert here. There's a couple of steps to assuring we have no clones. First: IP number/e-mail trace. We can also look for MSN/AIM/ICQ similarities. Second: If the IP is slightly different or we're suspicious of a clone, we trace the IP address to a city or town. Basically, we go to NIC.com and resolve the IP address to see if it comes from the same ISP. Thirdly: Mannerisms. If the person is acting up in a similar way to before (s)he was banned, we'll do the aforementioned two steps. I think we do a pretty good job at preventing clones. If anyone gets through the net, they rarely become great contributors or troublemakers so it doesn't affect us. Sometimes I go through the list of validating users to see if there's any e-mails I notice from before, or duplicate emails validating.
Plus, if they manage to get away with it, chances are the reason they're a clone is because they were banned before, and when they come back as a clone, they're still the same jerk who does something to get banned again
But how can you be so sure of that.What if that person is sorry for what he has done?just curious.By the way sometimes i see in the Members section titles such as "Validating" what does that mean.Is it that he or she is not allowed to post?
Well, I'm an administrator on another LP fansite, and just by looking at the IPs of people under their posts, I can see that there's some who have one of those nifty little programs that changes their IP every few seconds, they're a pain in the ass to get rid of if they do something wrong. But even if they sign up on a different computer, for one, it'll most likely be in the same town, so at least one section of the IP will stay the same, unless they're under a different ISP. They'd have to use a different email to sign up, different information, different contact info, etc. So really you could theoretically get away with it, but it'd be tedious to do because you'd have to be really careful.
No I think it just means that they still haven't replied to the validation email yet. [/b][/quote] oh thanks
But how can you be so sure of that.What if that person is sorry for what he has done?just curious.By the way sometimes i see in the Members section titles such as "Validating" what does that mean.Is it that he or she is not allowed to post? [/b][/quote] If they were sorry for what they did, they would have stopped after the first or second warning. If the warnings were given out for different reasons, it was probably a good idea that person left.
But how can you be so sure of that.What if that person is sorry for what he has done?just curious.By the way sometimes i see in the Members section titles such as "Validating" what does that mean.Is it that he or she is not allowed to post? [/b][/quote] We don't care. They were given 2 previous warnings to shape up and start behaving themselves, and if those past 2 times they still continued to break the rules, then I have no sympathy for them even if they come crying back begging to be unbanned