People,
When you signed up for the Forums, one of the rules you said you would follow -- when you clicked on the little box that said "I understand these rules and promise to abide by them" -- was this one:
"One registration per user, please. Our system records your IP address, so we can tell if you've registered more than once."
However, over the course of the past ten or twelve weeks, the Forum admin staff and I have noticed a number of you who, well, aren't really a number of you. You're one or two or more of you, pretending to be three or four or five or six of you. Your IPs as recorded by the system (which also gives us enough information to know the physical locations of those IPs), and in some cases, your login times, confirm it beyond any doubt.
In the world of the Web, a person who isn't really a person, but someone else already on the board using another identity to "play with" or fool other members, is called a "sock puppet". Sockpuppetry usually starts out as a game, but it can quickly turn annoying and/or nasty, and has become the plague of some online communities.
I have no intention of letting sockpuppetry become a nuisance here. In the past there have been only isolated incidents on our Forums: they haven't lasted long, and I've let them pass as the members involved grew out of them or got bored with the game. But the number of incidences is starting to grow, as our membership has been doing...so it's become time to do something a little more proactive. The sockpuppetry is going to stop now: or, rather, it's going to start stopping.
In the short term, here's what's going to happen.
Today is Friday the 4th of August. The weekend is before us. If you are a manager of more than one online identity on the YW forums, I am going to give you until the weekend's over -- specifically, until Monday morning, August the 7th, to send me a PM here, or to email me and "give yourself up." If you do that, no further action will be taken against you. You'll decide which of your identities you want to keep, and the others will simply fade away. (Because I have no desire to embarrass anybody, I won't delete those "sockpuppet" memberships, which would give away your secret to anyone who went looking for that member to see if they were still in the roster. I'll just lock them so they can't be used again, and that member will be assumed to just not be showing up any more.)
However...if you do not give yourself up...then starting on Monday, August 7th, all your identities will be locked out of the Forums until you email me and come clean. If you want to argue the case with me, saying that all these identities are real, or are different people, there's a really simple test that I (or Peter or kli6) can administer to you to discover whether this is the truth. Anyone able to satisfy us by passing this test will be readmitted to the Forums without delay. Anyone who doesn't pass the test will remain locked out (and their IP also will be locked out) until they choose to tell me the truth about what's been going on. If you can't go along with the relatively few rules we have around here, I don't want you on DD's forums (and by the way, on this subject, she concurs).
Again, I have no desire to waste time chastising you folks. Some of you may have been unclear about the rules. This is a chance for everyone to get clear about this particular rule, and to make sure everyone's complying with it.
I will be attaching a note about this message to the Forum login procedure, and in a few other places, so that everyone will be sure to see it and will have a chance to confirm that they understand this policy.
Now the ball's in your court. Please do the honest thing, and save us all some time.
Thanks.
When you signed up for the Forums, one of the rules you said you would follow -- when you clicked on the little box that said "I understand these rules and promise to abide by them" -- was this one:
"One registration per user, please. Our system records your IP address, so we can tell if you've registered more than once."
However, over the course of the past ten or twelve weeks, the Forum admin staff and I have noticed a number of you who, well, aren't really a number of you. You're one or two or more of you, pretending to be three or four or five or six of you. Your IPs as recorded by the system (which also gives us enough information to know the physical locations of those IPs), and in some cases, your login times, confirm it beyond any doubt.
In the world of the Web, a person who isn't really a person, but someone else already on the board using another identity to "play with" or fool other members, is called a "sock puppet". Sockpuppetry usually starts out as a game, but it can quickly turn annoying and/or nasty, and has become the plague of some online communities.
I have no intention of letting sockpuppetry become a nuisance here. In the past there have been only isolated incidents on our Forums: they haven't lasted long, and I've let them pass as the members involved grew out of them or got bored with the game. But the number of incidences is starting to grow, as our membership has been doing...so it's become time to do something a little more proactive. The sockpuppetry is going to stop now: or, rather, it's going to start stopping.
In the short term, here's what's going to happen.
Today is Friday the 4th of August. The weekend is before us. If you are a manager of more than one online identity on the YW forums, I am going to give you until the weekend's over -- specifically, until Monday morning, August the 7th, to send me a PM here, or to email me and "give yourself up." If you do that, no further action will be taken against you. You'll decide which of your identities you want to keep, and the others will simply fade away. (Because I have no desire to embarrass anybody, I won't delete those "sockpuppet" memberships, which would give away your secret to anyone who went looking for that member to see if they were still in the roster. I'll just lock them so they can't be used again, and that member will be assumed to just not be showing up any more.)
However...if you do not give yourself up...then starting on Monday, August 7th, all your identities will be locked out of the Forums until you email me and come clean. If you want to argue the case with me, saying that all these identities are real, or are different people, there's a really simple test that I (or Peter or kli6) can administer to you to discover whether this is the truth. Anyone able to satisfy us by passing this test will be readmitted to the Forums without delay. Anyone who doesn't pass the test will remain locked out (and their IP also will be locked out) until they choose to tell me the truth about what's been going on. If you can't go along with the relatively few rules we have around here, I don't want you on DD's forums (and by the way, on this subject, she concurs).
Again, I have no desire to waste time chastising you folks. Some of you may have been unclear about the rules. This is a chance for everyone to get clear about this particular rule, and to make sure everyone's complying with it.
I will be attaching a note about this message to the Forum login procedure, and in a few other places, so that everyone will be sure to see it and will have a chance to confirm that they understand this policy.
Now the ball's in your court. Please do the honest thing, and save us all some time.
Thanks.
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