CmdrTaco's Journal: Anonymous Replies

One very common abuse of the posting system is for a user to post something logged in, and then reply to himself anonymously pretending to agree with his point. "Yes yes, I agree with what Joe is saying." Or in the case of trolls, they might go so far as to argue with themself. A single person can make it look as if they are a dozen with just a couple of accounts.

I've seen some pretty terrible abuses of this problem, but usually it's relatively minor. I've been toying with an idea to solve this problem to at least some extent- essentially, if the same IP replies to itself using a different nickname or anonymously, we auto-moderate the reply down. We can exclude proxy servers from this. We could expand this to only allow a single nickname to post within a single forum, but I don't know how many false hits that would catch in the net.

The idea of allowing anonymous posting is that sometimes you need to say something that for very real, very legitimate reasons, you don't want your name attached to it. The logic behind this is that if you're trying to alternate between signing your name and not, you're more likely to be abusing the system than to be using it legitimately.

Thoughts? A few of you can post. Others can email.

public information

[tf23]

I would like to see such a 'list of abusers' be made public. Perhaps with links to their original posts.

That way I can mark them foe and seemingly ignore them.

Tough one

[Dark Coder]

IP address are a band-aid and do not work for increasingly number of proxy world (until we go IPv6).

But checking user-info cookies while performing anonymous posting may be helpful.

Re:Tough one

[jamie]

Cookies won't help. Users intending to do harm will just log out or launch a different browser.

Proxies, though, are complicated. IP addresses don't stop determined attackers, but not everyone is "determined." Just like mediocre security won't stop the NSA, but if all you need to do is keep your kid sister away from your ice cream [schneier.com], mediocre security may be good enough :)