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.