User Fraud on my Site

Users with multiple ID's irritating my 'honest' users

[lorenzinho2]

Hi all,

I administer an online community that relies entirely on user-generated content. Much like WebmasterWorld, users develop different reputations based on their posts, and based on others' feedback to those posts. Recently, we've been having a lot of issues with users creating mutliple ID's in order to artificially inflate the reputation of their primary ID. For obvious reasons, this is really irritating my honest users.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how I can 1) identify these multiple ID users; and 2) discourage them from continuing to violate the integrity of the site?

Is there a tool out there with which I can associate user ID with an IP address? has anyone else dealt with this kind of issue?

thanks

[Jenstar]

Many boards have an IP checking tool for admins, either as a standard feature or an add-on. Have you checked to see if yours offers something?

I have had a similar sort of thing happening, and IP left a tracking trail to figure out who was using multiple user names.

[lorenzinho2]

Unfortunately, this feature was not built into my admin site. The site is not a typical board, and was built from scratch. The closest I have is WebTrends which shows me the IP addresses of the top 20 users, which isn't helpful.

Actually, one of the chronic abusers is consistently leaving posts (through multiple ids, i disable one, she creates another), claiming her program tells her all of the users that have multiple ID's on the site. Any idea what she could be using?

[bcolflesh]

Any idea what she could be using?

Her imagination - or her root password access to your site...

[rogerd]

Lorenzinho2, you need to add IP recording to the software or do an upgrade to a better BBS package. Software like vBulletin (and no doubt many others) will let you easily see who's posting from what IPs, and what IPs each user posts from. You can then ban by e-mail, IPs, etc. A resourceful spammer can always get through, but by creating enough roadblocks you can almost certainly drive your pests elsewhere.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

[lorenzinho2]

thanks all, i will check out vbulletin.

[Jenstar]

phpbb also has IP checks.

Alternatively, you could completely ban her from your site by IP address. This is something else many message boards have built-in (including phpbb)

[lorenzinho2]

Actually, I don't think that a message board package is going to work for me - I have a customized admin site that works for my site's specific architecture - I need something that I can layer on of my existing admin functionality.

[roddy]

An option I've used is to ban by email address - the board I use allows you to ban all yahoo.com addresses, mail.ru addresses (which I had to do when I got a lot of members signing up who did nothing but link to drug-testing sites - all of whom had mail.ru addresses), dodgyspam.net addresses, etc.

This obviously means you need to be using an email address to validate an account - which you should be doing as a basic anti-idiot measure anyway.

Roddy

[Rosalind]

Phpbb has a search and replace feature that you can use to root out swearwords. If this user has a dynamic IP and multiple email addresses, you could still make the posts useless if she tends to leave the same messages most of the time.