What do you do when you find out that an IP-Address has two or more accounts on your forum, do you warn them or do you allow this to happen on your forum?
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Mutliple accounts
- Thread starter Smithy
- Start date
Shortie
Well-known member
Unless I knew for sure it was someone ban evading then I would reach out and speak to the member in question. Sometimes people forget their log in details or even forget they have an account so I give them the option to merge.
Yvonne Smith
Well-known member
This is an interesting question. Both my husband (Bobby Cole) and myself have an account on this forum, and we use the same WiFi connection, although we each have our own iPad that we use when posting here.
Does that show up as using the same IP address, or can you tell it is two separate people that use the same internet connection ?
Axel Slingerland
Blues Rocker
Something I learned over the years as a Forum Administrator, is you there is only one way to ban anyone without banning countless other people. As Nomad pointed out, IP Addresses are shared. If you ban someone by blocking their IP Address, you're potentially banning untold numbers of innocent people from even registering.
If you block email servers, you're blocking everyone who uses those servers. For example, a friend asked me if he should ban gmail.com. I told him if you do that you would be blocking over a billion email accounts from registering for his forum.
Thus the only way to effectively ban anyone is by their chosen name. Either their forum user name or by the name on their email account. Even those are not foolproof, but at least someone would have to try to register with a specifically banned name to be affected.
Back in the early Invision Power Board days, a friend of mine made an IPB mod he called Miserable User. They way it worked was instead of banning someone you make them choose to leave on their own. He put in three primary levels of "discomfort", set my the Forum Administrator. The first was posts would take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to be posted to the forum, with the length of time selected at random, the second was 2 minutes to 10 minutes and the third was 4 minutes to never posting in that log in session.
This proved to be very effective. From what I understand, XenForo has a similar feature built in. It's called Discouraged, and according to a member on the XenForo forum you find it by clicking on a member name > Edit member and at the bottom of that page is a check / tick box labeled Discouraged. I would imagine this most likely works in a similar fashion, or at least the desired outcome is the same if it isn't.
The Miserable User gets annoyed at how slow the forum is. He posts about it and everyone else says the forum is working fine. He gets more annoyed and whines a little more. Then the Forum Administrator tells his how the Internet works, how he writes something and when he hits Post, packets of data containing what he wrote are sent out from his computer, bouncing from one Internet Backbone Server to another, and finally it hit the forum server and hopefully gets posted. But if a forum is on a shared server that too could slow it down. That isn't entirely true, since he's already connected to your server, but the data is sent from your computer across the Internet.
He keeps trying to post and gets more and more annoyed and finally says the hell with it and goes somewhere else to annoy other people... Problem solved! You win a Cookie.
Edit: I hate it when I forget key words...
If you block email servers, you're blocking everyone who uses those servers. For example, a friend asked me if he should ban gmail.com. I told him if you do that you would be blocking over a billion email accounts from registering for his forum.
Thus the only way to effectively ban anyone is by their chosen name. Either their forum user name or by the name on their email account. Even those are not foolproof, but at least someone would have to try to register with a specifically banned name to be affected.
Back in the early Invision Power Board days, a friend of mine made an IPB mod he called Miserable User. They way it worked was instead of banning someone you make them choose to leave on their own. He put in three primary levels of "discomfort", set my the Forum Administrator. The first was posts would take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to be posted to the forum, with the length of time selected at random, the second was 2 minutes to 10 minutes and the third was 4 minutes to never posting in that log in session.
This proved to be very effective. From what I understand, XenForo has a similar feature built in. It's called Discouraged, and according to a member on the XenForo forum you find it by clicking on a member name > Edit member and at the bottom of that page is a check / tick box labeled Discouraged. I would imagine this most likely works in a similar fashion, or at least the desired outcome is the same if it isn't.
The Miserable User gets annoyed at how slow the forum is. He posts about it and everyone else says the forum is working fine. He gets more annoyed and whines a little more. Then the Forum Administrator tells his how the Internet works, how he writes something and when he hits Post, packets of data containing what he wrote are sent out from his computer, bouncing from one Internet Backbone Server to another, and finally it hit the forum server and hopefully gets posted. But if a forum is on a shared server that too could slow it down. That isn't entirely true, since he's already connected to your server, but the data is sent from your computer across the Internet.
He keeps trying to post and gets more and more annoyed and finally says the hell with it and goes somewhere else to annoy other people... Problem solved! You win a Cookie.
Edit: I hate it when I forget key words...
Last edited:
Cpvr
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2024
- Messages
- 394
It would show up as the same ip, but there’s also tracking devices that forum owners can implement that display the user agent & device that a user is currently using.
Which would actually enable them to see that there isn’t multiple account usage by the same ip.
Such as, these add ons:
User agent
Premium upgrade: This XF2 add-on along with the entire collection can be purchased for $35.00 USD. Your Premium upgrade will allow you to download as many XF2 add-ons as you like for one year. Please see the entire collection located in the...
xenforo.com
[DigitalPoint] Security
Features Option for Days to trust two-step verification. Now you can set it to whatever is appropriate for your site, vs it being hardcoded to 30 days in XenForo. Option for Recommended strong two-step options. This allows you to encourage...
xenforo.com
Duplicate account check
Premium upgrade: This XF2 add-on along with the entire collection can be purchased for $35.00 USD. Your Premium upgrade will allow you to download as many XF2 add-ons as you like for one year. Please see the entire collection located in the...
xenforo.com
Marie Mallory
Well-known member
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2025
- Messages
- 320
You mean I joined twice? JK, I hope.
Nomad
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2024
- Messages
- 48
If you pay attention to IP address, the both accounts will have shared IP address. Some forums do not allow shared IP address, some forums do not allow more than two accounts from the same household. However, there are also ways to identify whether the two accounts are same or different other than the IP address.
Axel Slingerland
Blues Rocker
And none of that is foolproof... Which is why I would never pay for such things. This is another example of why I preferred free forum software over pay as you go forum software. You can get a lot of the same type of features for free, and it costs you nothing when something doesn't work as advertised.
The forum for Euro Truck Simulator 2 that I play now and then (I love driving games) has been running PHPBB since 2012, and it was installed poorly for most of that time. They game's developer SCS Software had "bigger fish to fry than messing with a forum." So they did a half baked job of installing it, and even so it worked moderately well for over a decade. Now it's run a little better, but it's still running the same free PHPBB forum software. A better run PHPBB forum is the one for ProMods, who developed the massive ETS2 map addons I've mentioned.
Note: It was not my intention to advertise ETS2. These are just two examples for PHPBB. My point is, IF you have a community, you can get by with free software and the vast majority of people will take little notice that you don't use expensive software.
The forum for Euro Truck Simulator 2 that I play now and then (I love driving games) has been running PHPBB since 2012, and it was installed poorly for most of that time. They game's developer SCS Software had "bigger fish to fry than messing with a forum." So they did a half baked job of installing it, and even so it worked moderately well for over a decade. Now it's run a little better, but it's still running the same free PHPBB forum software. A better run PHPBB forum is the one for ProMods, who developed the massive ETS2 map addons I've mentioned.
Note: It was not my intention to advertise ETS2. These are just two examples for PHPBB. My point is, IF you have a community, you can get by with free software and the vast majority of people will take little notice that you don't use expensive software.
Cpvr
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 23, 2024
- Messages
- 394
Some ip address can show the same users, especially if they’re from same country or location. This happens a lot from users that aren’t exactly in the United States, UK, Germany, India, or other well known countries.
The best way to track multiple account usage is via finger printing, device and user agent.
Which would then display what user is who.
Nomad
Well-known member
- Joined
- Dec 27, 2024
- Messages
- 48
That's very true IP address is not the way to track whether the user is unique or has duplicate account. If someone in my town, who has subscribed to the same internet service provider that I have subscribed, register on the forum, we both have the same IP address. I believe finger printing and device, and user agent are better ways to track multiple accounts