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/u/Phuksmulder aka Saverem was banned last night, plus related accounts

posted by Bretodeau on announcements

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

[–] 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.