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Showing results for tags 'User Ban Log'.
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SugarCookie created several duplicate accounts on 14 June 2010 after receiving less than stellar feedback. On 24 June 2010, we instigated an investigation into the duplicate accounts due to the sheer amount found by the analyzer (three mostly unused secondary accounts: shadowdoll, Cygnet, fairydoll; two primary accounts: SugarCookie, sakuratart) and gave them all restricted access. Between 24 June and 10 July, we had PMed both accounts and found many inconsistencies, and abnormal similarities in IP addresses (including finding that a cell phone had been used to go between the accounts a few times). On 13 July 2010, we received credible documentation from a member who had sold to SugarCookie and had reviewed their paypal account to see that sakuratart's email address was now listed. The secondary accounts were indefinitely suspended and the primary account (SugarCookie) was given a 30 day suspension. On 15 July 2010, SugarCookie created another duplicate account, playingwithaloadedgun, and all accounts were subsequently banned. Moral of the story: when on suspension for duplicate accounts, it is most unwise to create another one. -
[BANNED] ebonykawai, aka httpoo, aka raineygirl; shelldoo
ipb posted a blog entry in Forum Updates and News
After some drama blazed about her e-tail business, Atropa's Cottage, ebonykawaii created a sock puppet account, httpoo (on 17 May 2006). We were aware of its existence, but didn't do anything about it because initially, it was not being used. On 11 Sept 2009, httpoo was used to troll in a topic about the Black Butterfly Moon (August 2009) update. At this point in time, httpoo was put on the restricted duplicate account group and ebonykawaii suspended and warned that if another duplicate account was linked to her, she would be banned. On 22 Sept 2009, ebonykawaii created the raineygirl account, and was promptly banned. When we say we do not tolerate duplicate accounts, especially for sock puppet and trolling purposes, we mean it! --- In 2008, shelldoo and two other forum members collected money and goods for Beth and Ted's wedding present from the forum. Shelldoo insisted on collecting the money for the charitable donation and was supposed to donate over $1,500 of the collection to the ACLU in Beth and Ted's name. The donation was never made. While we didn't ban her for the massive swaplift that she also did around this time (spanning from approximately October 2008 - April 2009), when this problem was brought to our attention, we felt that this sort of abuse of our members' trust is intolerable and she was banned. -
[BANNED] beneathglass, aka Lia, aka loviatorthertip, aka herokitty
ipb posted a blog entry in Forum Updates and News
From roughly June 14-June 30, beneathglass contacted in excess of 100 members, offering to swap and/or sale. By July 3, we had received so many reports about slow swap/non communication that we restricted her access to the swaps forum. Around July 7, she was restricted from the private areas of the forum. On July 8, she created Lia and loviatorthertip to get around that restriction and was informed that another duplicate account would result in her getting banned. On August 5, she created herokitty and was banned. -
In the past, there's been a lot of speculation and false assumptions made concerning the banning of member accounts on this forum. Among many there seems to be a lot of false impressions over how often and how easily it is to get banned here. This may be in part our fault, as we have never drawn attention to the banning process, nor did typically discuss member banishments after the fact. This was because we felt it unfair to speak out about someone when they're not able to return and make a counter argument in their defense, because often the person still had friends on the forum and we didn't want to put them in an awkward position, and simply because we didn't want to further the unpleasantness of the situation. It was a decision we thought sound for a time, but clearly our silence on the subject has allowed people to believe that this is something we do far more often than we actually do and that we do it for simpler or pettier reasons than is the truth. So, to try to clear up any confusion or misconceptions about this touchy subject, we've decided to be more open about it and have all past and any future bannings presented in the public record. We hope this will help demonstrate that this not something we do often or lightly. And because of the sensitive nature of the subject, we're posting this information here rather than in the announcements area of the forum. To this date, we have banned 9 individuals: Unseelie, diabolique, BlueStar, wax, AngelFireHeart (aka: RainDropAngel), Black Medicine, wichapi (aka: ShyinChi, aka: MaineEvent), MissAnthropy (aka: InanimatusConjurus, aka: paintahappylittletree, aka: SeeYouNextTuesday), and tehriaz (aka: asunderpants, aka: omgriri). Details on the events leading up to each of these decisions will be posted as I have time to go through the various records. UPDATED 6 Oct 09: We have since banned 2 more individuals: beneathglass (aka Lia, aka loviatorthertip, aka herokitty) and ebonykawai (aka httpoo, aka raineygirl)
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UNSEELIE On December 12, 2004, Unseelie sent a brand new member a harassing PM and blocked her from being able to respond and received a 30% warning and a notice that further similar actions would be taken seriously. On April 17, 2005, she created a topic devoted about how "horrible and wretched" another member's signature was, and received a warning because her tone and words again violated the good manners rule. One month later, she altered her profile to verbally attack a moderator, and because she had already shown a pattern of harassment (both member and moderator), she was banned. (Incidentally, if this happened now, it would probably have been handled differently; these days, we prefer to give a suspension before banning.) WAX On May 31, 2006 after registering a new account here, wax attempted to hack our forum. As a result, he was banned. ANGELFIREHEART/ET AL On June 26, 2006, Rain Drop Angel (RDA) posted that AngelFireHeart (AFH) at committed suicide. After noticing that AFH had been logging in after her so-called death, we started doing a little investigation into her forum activity, and discovered AFH had been using the PM system after her "death," and that the person known to be behind the AFH account had made at least one account elsewhere (specifically on lost.fm) as RDA. Because of our suspicions, we did contact her local coroner's office, and was told that nobody had died at that address on or around the date we were told AFH had died, making this a case of pseudocide. As a result, on July 23, 2006, both accounts were banned for their outrageous abuse of our community. Note that if this happened today, our duplicate account tools would be able to catch any account switching and new account creating, so the extent that was gone to prove to ourselves that this really was a case of pseudocide would be unnecessary.
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On August 22, 2007, MissAnthropy created a new account (InanimatusConjurus) for the purposes of trolling in the Conjure Oils thread. She was subsequently put on a 1-month suspension. Within an hour of her suspension, she created a second new account (paintahappylittletree), presumably to continue monitoring the situation with Conjure Oils. At this point in time, she had an additional 6-months added to her suspension for attempting to circumvent her suspension. Within two hours, she created a third new account (SeeYouNextTuesday), using a transparent proxy and sent me the following message. At this point in time, she was banned.
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There have been rumors floating about administrative action dealing with secondary accounts and banning. (I'm saying "secondary account" rather than "duplicate account" because we're now seeing forum members loan their accounts to other people - so the second account that's involved isn't necessarily "duplicate", but it's not an approved usage.) As we've touched upon before, we have a slew of tools that we use to track secondary account activity, using common internet technologies such as cookies, sessions, and IP addresses. Cookies are tiny text files that live on your computer. You can opt out of them, though it takes away some of our cooler features (such as always staying logged in or collapsing forums). Sessions are something that our server create whenever you login. If you use cookies, there's actually cookies about your session information, and if you don't, the session information gets added to the end of the URLs. Cookies & sessions are specific not only your computer, but to your browser profile and computer login. IP addesses are like mailing addresses for computers, letting servers know how to send data (such as web pages and images) back and forth between a client (you) and a server (the host). Sometimes, there are intermediates between the two (like routers, firewalls, or proxies) - especially with dial-up or large networks - which will give the appearance of multiple people sharing an address. Like everything else on the internet, these tools create logs. We review the logs both in batches and individually. We occasionally target individual accounts that have been suspended from swapping, reported as a swaplifter, or suspended (in general) for non-random screening -- to ensure that people who aren't supposed to be accessing the forum or particular areas of the forum aren't doing so by other means and to ensure that people who are ripping off forum members aren't doing it with multiple accounts (such as last year's love.is.suicide/simple.delight incident). We could probably do away with all of these tools by forcing users to use services like ConfirmID to prove that they are who they say they are, but that requires all users be over 18, doesn't work for all countries, may not work if you've not got ready access to your proof of identity papers, and costs money -- and that doesn't work for us. Let me repeat: at the end of the day, all of this is to make sure that people who aren't supposed to be accessing the forum/parts of the forum (banned users, suspended users, and users who are restricted from certain areas of the forum) cannot do so, and that people who are trying to rip off others can't do so with as many accounts as they care to create. Furthermore, things like occasionally logging in at a friend's house, or a coworker's computer, or a computer lab rarely trigger our asking questions, and being picked out as having unusual account traffic patterns doesn't usually result in any more than just a standard questionnaire. But I digress. We have been hearing rumors about how wichapi's account became banned, and since some of these rumors allege some shocking activities on our part, we are going to address this issue. Normally, it's not our practice to publicly disclose the specific reasons for banning someone, but with these allegations roaming around about the reasons for this banning, we've decided to what happened a matter of public record. On February 11th, May 17th, and June 23rd (all in 2007), wichapi violated our price caps. Our policy on price caps states that on the third offense, users' accounts are barred from swapping for two months; on a fourth offence, they are permanently barred from swapping. I'm not going to discuss the merits of barring frequent price cap violators in this post -- that's its own discussion. Obviously, any swaps that were already in progress at the time of her banning could continue to their rightful conclusion -- but until late August, she could not start new swaps here at the forum. (Obviously, there was nothing stopping her from swapping on LJ or NALF or other locations.) Swaps were initiated on or around June 30, July 9th, July 10th by wichapi - despite having her access to the swaps forum taken away on June 23rd. Our logs showed that during this period of time, wichapi was using the account of a coworker ("Black Medicine") to access the forum from her computer. Literally: someone(s) was logging out of wichapi's account, logging into the "Black Medicine" account, look at topics in the swap forums, log out of the "Black Medicine" account, log into the wichapi account, and go about her business (including arranging swaps, as evidenced by shipping notifications and timestamps on the swap posts she had been responding to). Whether they were doing it together or it was just wichapi is irrelevant - both types of actions intentionally subvert wichapi's ban on swapping on this forum. On July 13th, the "Black Medicine" account was banned for abusing one of our members, abusing one of our moderators, and a long-established refusal to follow our guidelines. As is standard when we ban someone, we banned not only the account, but email addresses and IP addresses associated with it. On July 14th, wichapi contacted us because she was unable to access the forum. This initiated the duplicate account analyzer while we were waiting to hear back about what IP address(es) she was attempting to access the forum from. On July 15th, the account "ShyinChi" was created from wichapi's computer at home. Unlike most new users, this account accessed the New Members Validation Center (required by all users), scanned topics in the Introductions forum (which is where you go after you verify that you've read our rules), and visited several topics in the various swaps forums. Even when they don't read topics or participate, almost all of our new users visit other forums as well. On July 16th, it was established that while wichapi's computer was behind a network both at home and work, to the best of her knowledge, she is the only person that uses her computers. (Incidentally, this does imply that she had obtained the password for "Black Medicine".) On July 18th, wichapi mentioned that "Black Medicine" had accessed the forum from work - something we had already known. Nothing was said regarding home access, or about the "ShyinChi" account. On July 22nd, wichapi's account was suspended from the forum as a whole for 6 months, and at the conclusion of her suspension, it would be suspended from the swaps section for an additional 3 month. This suspension was entirely due to the fact that two secondary accounts (one legitimate account, "Black Medicine", and one duplicate account, "ShyinChi") were used to access the swaps forum from wichapi's computers at home AND work while wichapi was banned from swapping. In her suspension notification, she was informed that any additional duplicate account activity would result in her account being banned from the forum. On July 23rd, the account "MaineEvent" was created from wichapi's computer at work. On July 24th, wichapi's account was banned from the forum, with the caveat that if we saw account activity from the two accounts that wichapi claims she did not create that demonstrated that they were in fact separate accounts (that is: not using her computer or network accounts), we would reverse the ban and continue on with the suspension. On July 29th, wichapi provided the names of the individuals she claims created those accounts (two visiting artists), and complained that it wasn't fair that we were pegging her reinstatement on them. Additionally, she accused us of illegally penetrating her firewall in order to determine what happened on individual computers. On July 31st, we notified her that her account was permanently banned. To summarize: wichapi was initially barred from swapping for two months because she violated the price caps three times. It wasn't permanent, and it only applied to the swaps forum. Everything after that stemmed from her attempts to circumvent that barring, first by using other people's accounts, and then creating multiple accounts. After more than a dozen e-mails exchanged between she and we, during which she blamed co-workers at work and guests -- despite the fact that the log-in patterns clearly demonstrated that some of these other accounts were primarily logging on to spot potential swap partners, then logging back off so wichapi could contact them. At the end of the day, she was persistently attempting to circumvent the rules, and when we presented her with the evidence of that, she went so far as to accuse us of hacking her computers in obtaining that evidence. (For the record: we didn't.) As a result, we decided that she was not going to abide by our rules and had no wish to: we banned her.