Limit Profile Accounts, Request!

[Dazzal]

friday-night-lights2.proboards.com/

Dear Support Administrators:

This is a feature request for V6.

Approximately 12 forum owners have been affected by someone making multiple profiles every week. (Could be more Admins that we don't know about) The Admins support each other by sharing the same IP numbers and user names. nycolenivens is one name or they may change the first name with the last name Kovak. We post the user names and IP#s in a private area on one forum.

Similar names are Nivens and IP numbers that usually start with 172.88.88.56. I made the number up and names are made up. I could list numerous names, but you get the picture.

Most of the profiles are coming from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

This has been going on since April 2022. It's a nuisance and does cause anxiety for some forum owners that have health issues.

Our solution, and forgive me if I post this incorrectly, is to only allow 2 profiles per member and limit the email addresses to 2. If you come up with a different number, this is fine. We want the multiple profiles to decrease greatly.

We are not asking support Admins to be involved in getting rid of the spammers. This is a feature request to decrease the number of profile accounts a member can have. If it's an automatic feature, and if a member tries to make more than 2 profiles, they are denied it in the new V6 system.

My desire is that the new V6 system developers can put it in motion.

I have the support of owners/Admins and a few have asked me to post this thread on support.

We hope you will seriously consider this request. It will alleviate stress for us.

Thank You Kindly!

Dazzal

[Craig]

I don't think it would be a good idea to limit the number of accounts on all forums. The reason for this is that there are a lot of roleplaying forums, and by their nature, there are many members with multiple accounts for their characters.

It may be that they could make it a forum setting to allow each forum to set how many accounts each email address could have.

One positive of what you posted above, however, is that these people may go ahead and create accounts using different emails. At least if they are using the same email address you are able to keep an eye on the accounts they register.

I've marked this as a feature request

[Dazzal]

Thank you Craig. I wasn't aware that is what members do on the roleplaying forums.

The way it is now, PB members can have unlimited profiles, as long as they have unlimited e-mails. They aren't using the same email addresses, Craig. Most of the email accounts are gmail, outlook, and hotmail. There is one user that we believe has up to 200 email accounts because the person uses the same last name, with a different first name. Or the same first names and different last names. The names are always similar.

I really hope there is a way to solve this issue.

[moonbeam]

Dazzal What about using restricted registration? That way, you can view the account details and approve or deny based on that. There's also nothing stopping you from disabling or deleting all but one or two of that member's accounts from your forum. Maybe keep the 2 oldest and disable or delete the rest? I have a rule on my forum that only one account is allowed except under certain special circumstances. And they have to clear it with me before creating the second.

[Kami]

I just wanted to temper expectations here: Logistically, there is no way to do this.

Short of ProBoards attempting to convince users to download a separate program to trigger a hardware ban (which would likely not even work because PB is a website, not a piece of software you install on your machine, so there's no way to force this), there is no way to tell by any automated processes whether or not an email account belongs to a specific person and then prevent them from doing something. This would require identity based tracking which is a massive privacy issue (and forbidden in places like the EU) because it would require something like forcing users to input a phone number or government ID in order to register.

Yes, there can be patterns in someone's habit of creating multiple emails, but what happens if there isn't? What happens if it's just a coincidence that someone's email address is similar? What if (and this has happened before, particularly on PB) someone is using legitimate addresses that don't belong to them to spam registrations? People can change their devices, can change their IP (or may have a VPN or dynamic IP to begin with). I could create 100 emails right now and you'd never be able to tie them to me if I used any number of methods at my disposal. There's no way for PB to stop me, because email addresses are a dime a dozen and even from reputable providers like gmail or hotmail requires virtually no personal information to set up.

There's no reliable tech-side solution to this without invading people's privacy.

[bigballofyarn]

I think all the awesome people above already addressed the technical aspects of what I want to say.

However, I'd like to add that this is one unfortunate hardship of being an awesome admin like yourself. You and your forum are so amazing that someone is making it their life mission to cause you chaos. It's an absurd and backwards compliment. If I had a way to fix this for you, I would. I just want to virtually send you hugs and peace. I hope things get better for you.

[Dazzal]

moonbeam I appreciate your advice, but the Admins involved in dealing with the multiple profiles institute everything you are stating here. I also have in my guidelines that only one account is allowed per member. These are Admins that have had their forums 10 years or more. Mine is on my 15th. year. The only way we know for sure is to let the person on the forum and decide from there. We have restricted registration as well.

Kami So you are stating it's impossible. We as Admins don't know what is possible and impossible with the Probards system. I was hoping there would be a way for the V6 system to only allow a certain amount of profiles. I do know that people can use many devices and have different IPs.

A lot of us came over from Yuku, and in that system, we gathered the spammer information and made support tickets. Many times they banned the user Yuku wide. I don't know how they were able to do that because their system was entirely different from this one.

Thanks for the feedback.

[Dazzal]

bigballofyarn I have seen your posts and you are always so sweet. This isn't just about me. It's about many Admins experiencing the same thing. I am just the person relaying the message.

[Kami]

Sept 26, 2022 12:32:12 GMT -8 Dazzal said:

moonbeam I appreciate your advice, but the Admins involved in dealing with the multiple profiles institute everything you are stating here. I also have in my guidelines that only one account is allowed per member. These are Admins that have had their forums 10 years or more. Mine is on my 15th. year. The only way we know for sure is to let the person on the forum and decide from there. We have restricted registration as well.

Kami So you are stating it's impossible. We as Admins don't know what is possible and impossible with the Probards system. I was hoping there would be a way for the V6 system to only allow a certain amount of profiles. I do know that people can use many devices and have different IPs.

A lot of us came over from Yuku, and in that system, we gathered the spammer information and made support tickets. Many times they banned the user Yuku wide. I don't know how they were able to do that because their system was entirely different from this one.

Thanks for the feedback.

Correct, I am saying this is impossible without invading people's privacy. This is a limitation of how the internet works in places that do not require a government ID to access the internet, which is most places in the world. Without personally identifiable information there is no way to for-sure prevent someone's access to any given website in any fashion beyond the tools any website already has at its disposal (email / IP bans, restricting registration globally, etc).

So basically, it's functionally impossible. We (as in, any one who runs a website or online service of any sort) have no way to see the identity behind any account with the information available to us.

Here's another thread (this is talking about a video game, but it is also applicable to really any online service) about why Identity-based bans / restrictions aren't feaasible: (for context, this poster, dan, is a colleague of mine who works in Information Security).

I think the thing you're misunderstanding from what I'm saying is that this is a limitation by PB's "system". Any service can institute a service-wide ban for a specific IP or specific email address (whether one, or multiple), but what you are talking about here isn't possible because you're requesting that PB enact restrictions based on a specific identity which is what I'm saying is impossible: PB can ban IPs and emails, just like any other service, but they cannot prevent them from creating more emails to register or from changing their IPs etc.

[Scott]

Sept 26, 2022 12:32:12 GMT -8 Dazzal said:

A lot of us came over from Yuku, and in that system, we gathered the spammer information and made support tickets. Many times they banned the user Yuku wide. I don't know how they were able to do that because their system was entirely different from this one.

Have you made any reports to the Abuse Team regarding the issue you are having?

[Dazzal]

Sept 26, 2022 12:48:28 GMT -8 Scott said:

Sept 26, 2022 12:32:12 GMT -8 Dazzal said:

A lot of us came over from Yuku, and in that system, we gathered the spammer information and made support tickets. Many times they banned the user Yuku wide. I don't know how they were able to do that because their system was entirely different from this one.

Have you made any reports to the Abuse Team regarding the issue you are having?

Scott Yes! I communicated respectfully just like I am right now with the support team. The Abuse department replied to my message and asked me to provide a link to the person we feel is making the multiple profiles. It was a link to a thread that was on another forum. As soon as I tried to reply I was shut down. The emails came back, so that told me they did not want to deal with it. We'll just continue to ban.

[Scott]

Dazzal - can you please explain what you mean "the emails came back"?

[Dazzal]

Sept 26, 2022 13:13:22 GMT -8 Scott said:

Dazzal - can you please explain what you mean "the emails came back"?

I replied to the email that the Abuse team member sent me, and my email came back stating that it did not go through. For example, if I send an email to someone that doesn't use the email address anymore, it comes back. It was the same email address to the abuse team that I had originally used.

[Scott]

Dazzal - if an email came back as undeliverable, assuming you just clicked reply and not mistyped the address, then it was a technical fail somewhere along the line. It was not an action by the Abuse Team.

[Dazzal]

Sept 26, 2022 13:22:32 GMT -8 Scott said:

Dazzal - if an email came back as undeliverable, assuming you just clicked reply and not mistyped the address, then it was a technical fail somewhere along the line. It was not an action by the Abuse Team.

I felt they didn't want to address it because of the tone of the email. That's all I can go by.