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Multiple different accounts were created and used to upvote his own stuff and target other users with downvotes. This is the second or third time a user has been banned for vote manipulation, and as far as I can remember, the only reason aside from spamming that a user has ever been banned. Please do not create alts for the sole purpose of giving yourself more internet points, it's pointless and we will be able to find out if it's happening.

In the future, we could implement account restrictions to try and curb this. Currently we have no restrictions on freshly created accounts, other than sub creation and captchas for posting. We could maybe add up/downvote restrictions based on age of account or account level.

But yeah, thought it would be best to make a note of the banning rather than explain what happened in a couple of weeks if someone asked where he went.

PS: No, the irony of making this post on an admin alt is not lost on me.
Multiple different accounts were created and used to upvote his own stuff and target other users with downvotes. This is the second or third time a user has been banned for vote manipulation, and as far as I can remember, the only reason aside from spamming that a user has ever been banned. Please do not create alts for the sole purpose of giving yourself more internet points, it's pointless and we will be able to find out if it's happening. In the future, we could implement account restrictions to try and curb this. Currently we have no restrictions on freshly created accounts, other than sub creation and captchas for posting. We could maybe add up/downvote restrictions based on age of account or account level. But yeah, thought it would be best to make a note of the banning rather than explain what happened in a couple of weeks if someone asked where he went. PS: No, the irony of making this post on an admin alt is not lost on me.

28 comments

[–] [Deleted] 3 points (+3|-0)

i also have a hard time believing it based on how well i know him but the effort someone would have to go to in order to frame him is more unbelievable in my opinion. either way, i don't think it was about internet points but instead about trying to skew our or others' interpretation of users, the site and/or political beliefs. you can bet i'll be keeping an eye out for anything strangely similar to this happening again.
[–] PMYA 4 points (+4|-0)

This interpretation does match up with the posts/users/comments etc. that had votes applied. At the end of the day the reasoning behind it doesn't matter, accounts were made for voting reasons, and that's all we know.

Also going to reply to @Sarcastaway here. It is a shame he was banned, I enjoyed talking to him from time to time and he made some decent posts. I do think though that the best way to stop this kind of thing from going on is to not make any exceptions on bans for doing it. Honestly, things could have gone differently if he had owned up to it, but he denied doing it when asked directly by @Polsaker, and even went as far as continuing to message us asking for our logs.
[–] smallpond 4 points (+4|-0)

At the end of the day the reasoning behind it doesn't matter, accounts were made for voting reasons, and that's all we know.

I hope that's not all you know. If you can't determine that accounts were made by Saverem for voting purposes to a high degree of confidence, I can't agree with the ban. As @fluf suggests above, is it possible that someone could have framed him?

Do we now have a simple method for getting people we don't like banned from the website?

Also: If you're banning for vote manipulation, shouldn't you add at least something along those lines to the TOS?
[–] PMYA 3 points (+3|-0)

and that's all we know

I was referring to being speculative as to the reasoning behind it, not that he had the accounts. We don't ban for it if we're not 100% sure, in this case the proof was there to be completely certain. Everyone looked through the logs and discussed it before it happened.

I guess it could be added to the TOS, it just never really came up in discussion at the time the TOS was written. Saverem was around for a while though and knew about previous bans for vote manipulation, so it's not like his ban came out of nowhere.
[–] [Deleted] 2 points (+2|-0)

im not an admin and don't know what all they keep in their logs but you can absolutely harvest and spoof some personally identifiable information. this would mean there's premeditation though and if there's a premeditated effort to ban someone, why saverem? he's not really the most aggressive user by any measure, at least that i've seen.

if it does happen to be that he was framed, then someone has likely harvested the info used on many of us and could do the same or similar nefarious stuff to others. so keep your eyes open.

more likely though, we just don't know random dude on the internet as well as previously thought and he tried to pull a fast one.
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