I'm noticing that more and more people are trying to abuse our system by creating duplicate accounts, I've just banned 3 accounts from one single person as they were using it for referrals to try and gain a reward which is normally Elite or Extreme Membership.
This kind of behaviour will NOT be tolerated. Soon I'm going to make a change which will catch out a lot of people trying to abuse the system with duplicate account creation.
I have a method of dealing with people like this. I simple search for the users IP and find other accounts linked with the same IP, then I ban the account with the least or no posts and keep the account that has contributed (even if it's poor quality posting).
This new system that I am implementing should stop many people from creating new accounts from the same IP however it's not impossible to bypass.
Users who 2 accounts will be let of now as I've only just creating this thread, but as of now new users with 2 or more accounts will get both accounts banned as well as an IP ban for life.
We don't ban users to be mean, we do it for many reasons.
- Reduces database size (less server load) - Less users & more quality posting, not loads of users but no posts. - To stop users abusing the system, reputation, referrals,etc.
The only way where 2 or more accounts is allowed is if you have a problem and cannot access your account or if your account was stolen, in which case we will match IP addresses.