Topic: banned user verification needed

Posted under General

Char

Former Staff

I got an e-mail about a week ago (yes I'm that far behind) from the owner of this account: https://e621.net/user/show/76555

They claim that they're not the person that the ban message says they are. It seems that only one IP has ever been used for that account, and it doesn't seem tied to any of the accounts mentioned in the ban reason.

If anyone has any further information on this, please let me know. Otherwise I'm going to be forced to unban for having no proof on our side.

Updated by ippiki ookami

I didn't realize you guys needed proof to ban someone. What are they going to do if you're wrong, sue you? Ippiki must have had a good reason to believe they were the person in question, otherwise he wouldn't have banned them.

Updated by anonymous

Char, wrong forum, this is not the admin section.

:U

Digital_Kindness said:
I didn't realize you guys needed proof to ban someone. What are they going to do if you're wrong, sue you? Ippiki must have had a good reason to believe they were the person in question, otherwise he wouldn't have banned them.

I'm somewhat sure this is one of those "We don't want to be powerhungry assholes" things responsible people tend to do.

Updated by anonymous

NotMeNotYou said:
I'm somewhat sure this is one of those "We don't want to be powerhungry assholes" things responsible people tend to do.

It's not a matter of being a 'powerhungry asshole', it's a matter of them running the site. We're not talking about copyright infringement or something else that there's legal ramifications over, we're talking about someone claiming that they're not the person who was banned. Burden of proof is on them, imo.

Like I said, they must have had a good reason for banning them. The account was made in September of last year, had no uploads, no tag edits, no comments, no nothing...and it's just become a problem now? Just because it doesn't share an IP address with the other accounts doesn't mean anything.

Updated by anonymous

Digital_Kindness said:
It's not a matter of being a 'powerhungry asshole', it's a matter of them running the site. We're not talking about copyright infringement or something else that there's legal ramifications over, we're talking about someone claiming that they're not the person who was banned. Burden of proof is on them, imo.

Like I said, they must have had a good reason for banning them. The account was made in September of last year, had no uploads, no tag edits, no comments, no nothing...and it's just become a problem now? Just because it doesn't share an IP address with the other accounts doesn't mean anything.

First things first, if the head admins says it's getting done a certain way then this will probably be the way it will be done.
As to the why, if the reason for the ban isn't given, why should the ban stay?
That's like throwing someone in prison and treating him as guilty until he proves otherwise. And that simply because he happened to stand nearby.

If the Ippiki had a good reason, then he will stay banned, if Ippiki had no good reason, then it was a mistake in the first place and will probably be reverted.
Last time I checked this isn't FA where people get banned for teh lulz and the admins won't admit to mistakes, if they made one.

Updated by anonymous

Do you really read the emails you get? I thought you threw them to the fire.

NotMeNotYou said:
Last time I checked this isn't FA where people get banned for teh lulz and the admins won't admit to mistakes, if they made one.

Remember when certain toaster blocked people for posting spiders? Though those where for a few minutes

Updated by anonymous

Char

Former Staff

Oops, yeah, this wasn't supposed to be a public topic. :| My bad. Not because there's anything to hide, but just because it's not something that needs to involve the rest of the users commenting on the situation, which makes things more difficult and time-consuming to sort through.

Updated by anonymous

Well we might as well keep it public at this point since it's been sitting for several hours and transparency is a good thing. I banned that account because there have been countless others under the same name who were confirmed to be him (bugmenot/bugmen0t/bugmen00t etc). I probably didn't run the IP's since the odds of it being a different person are immeasurably low.
I'll admit the fact that this one account responded back is strange, but I don't think that lends credibility to their case.
And for those wondering why he was permabanned in the first place, he was a butthole.

Updated by anonymous

Char

Former Staff

ippiki_ookami said:
Well we might as well keep it public at this point since it's been sitting for several hours and transparency is a good thing. I banned that account because there have been countless others under the same name who were confirmed to be him (bugmenot/bugmen0t/bugmen00t etc). I probably didn't run the IP's since the odds of it being a different person are immeasurably low.
I'll admit the fact that this one account responded back is strange, but I don't think that lends credibility to their case.
And for those wondering why he was permabanned in the first place, he was a butthole.

It was probably a "generic" account created by someone for http://bugmenot.com/view/e621.net

Not that I'm really comfortable with such public accounts to begin with, but I figure if they're not causing trouble, then there's no need to ban. Only takes one person to screw it up for everyone else that would use one of those accounts though, and we should certainly never upgrade them.

It's one of those "we'll deal with it if it actually becomes a real problem" kind of things, in my opinion.

Addendum: Not that I'm saying the account in question should be unbanned, I'm just searching for more information as to why it was banned is all.

Updated by anonymous

Thing is, this particular user has been banned probably over two dozen times on other accounts and I don't want to send the message that if you ban evade enough, we'll just forget about it and leave you alone. As far as the IP's go, here is a list of some of the confirmed evasion accounts, including a few of the bugmenot variations. And although no IP's match up exactly, some of them come very close. If you still want to give him the benefit of the doubt, that's your call.

(Char-edit: link to IP address search removed because you can derive IP addresses from the URL alone.)

Updated by anonymous

Char

Former Staff

I'm going to unban this account, since I don't agree that the IP addresses that it has used are similar enough to the ones used by the other accounts. I'd at least need the network address portion of the IPs to be the same. When we're almost constantly serving at least 2000+ visitors to the site, I'm going to expect IP addresses to overlap a bit between our users.

Additionally, this particular "bugmenott" account doesn't seem to actually be listed on bugmenot.com for e621.net. So unless it was removed from bugmenot.com at some point (which I'm not sure you can actually do), it looks like this was just an account name created in reference to bugmenot.com, not specifically FOR bugmenot.com.

I realize that's a lot of assuming on my part, but I'm not willing to kill off innocent user accounts in an attempt to hunt down ban-evaders. Can I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this person is NOT a ban-evader? No, but then all we have to go on that they are a ban evader is a hunch because their username is similar and their IP address matches only the first octet (first numbers) of a ban-evader's very extensive list of IP addresses.

We'll need to just wait and see with this account like we've done before. If they end up causing problems, then perhaps they were a ban evader and we can just ban them again. If they don't end up causing problems, then the bans did their job (or they weren't an evader to begin with).

I know I've said this before, but I'd prefer us to use bans as a form of correction, not punishment. Obviously some users just won't care, particularly ban-evaders, but we're always going to have those and we can only do so much within reason to handle them before we start causing collateral damage. If a user was terrible when they got banned, they'll more than likely continue being terrible on any other accounts they make too, and will continue getting banned.

Edit: I do appreciate the vigilance though in trying to cover all your bases and making sure that all of a user's alt accounts get banned when their main account gets banned. :) We'll have one like this every once in a while though, so don't worry about it too much.

Updated by anonymous

Digital_Kindness said:
Burden of proof is on them, imo.

Thank god you don't run the country I live in.

Updated by anonymous

Foobaria said:
Thank god you don't run the country I live in.

Thank god you don't live in the country I live in.

Updated by anonymous

Mario583 said:

Foobaria said:
Thank god you don't run the country I live in.

Thank god you don't live in the country I live in.

Thank bananabot you don't command the country I live in.

But seriously, it's good to know admins are doing their job.

Updated by anonymous

Foobaria said:
Thank god you don't run the country I live in.

If a user who has been banned for being an ban-evading account comes back months later and says 'I am not that person', then they'd better have some proof.

Updated by anonymous

Char

Former Staff

Digital_Kindness said:
If a user who has been banned for being an ban-evading account comes back months later and says 'I am not that person', then they'd better have some proof.

Not if we don't have our own evidence lined up first, then all they'd have to do is just challenge that :P

Updated by anonymous

Why would anyone make a bugmenot for e621? There isn't any super special hidden content for signed in users... (which is the PRIMARY reason 80% of our users do not register :p) but yeah... whhhhhy

Updated by anonymous

Aurali said:
Why would anyone make a bugmenot for e621?

Why would anyone make a bugmenot for anything

Updated by anonymous

Mario583 said:
Why would anyone make a bugmenot for anything

Mario583 said:
Why would anyone make a bugmenot for anything

I use bugmenot for any place where I don't condone giving an email address.

Updated by anonymous

The only reason I made an account on this site was to use the blacklist. And the only reason I was *willing* to make an account on this site is I was able to do it without putting in an email address.

Updated by anonymous

Aurali said:
Why would anyone make a bugmenot for e621? There isn't any super special hidden content for signed in users... (which is the PRIMARY reason 80% of our users do not register :p) but yeah... whhhhhy

I was going to say "maybe for drive-by commenting (skipping the weeklong wait)" (as hinted at by the username i_must_disagree), but then I realized that the question is why would anyone make a bugmenot account. In which case the answer is probably that it's a very low-effort way to feel helpful.

Updated by anonymous

Aurali said:
Why would anyone make a bugmenot for e621? There isn't any super special hidden content for signed in users... (which is the PRIMARY reason 80% of our users do not register :p) but yeah... whhhhhy

I was going to ask why but then

There isn't any super special hidden content for signed in users... (which is the PRIMARY reason 80% of our users do not register :p)

I did register to be able to comment. Then it was to fave and lastly to blacklist...

Updated by anonymous

Xch3l said:
I was going to ask why but thenI did register to be able to comment. Then it was to fave and lastly to blacklist...

I came here because I was tired of Furaffinity. I came here as a 'normal' guy, and I've since acquired upwards of 8 different fetishes. and i think i discovered a new one

Updated by anonymous

Renard_Queenston said:
I came here because I was tired of Furaffinity. I came here as a 'normal' guy, and I've since acquired upwards of 8 different fetishes. and i think i discovered a new one

...ok

On the other hand, I realized there could be a vast underlying forum that blows this one out of the water, im talking millions of threads in this "deep forum"
However I doubt the vastness of these "underground admin forums" it still is quite interesting to ponder on....

Updated by anonymous

(Jayfeather) said:
On the other hand, I realized there could be a vast underlying forum that blows this one out of the water, im talking millions of threads in this "deep forum"
However I doubt the vastness of these "underground admin forums" it still is quite interesting to ponder on....

They make fun of the Member level users

Updated by anonymous

Xch3l said:
They make fun of the Member level users

Admin level users are just Member level users with a different level, so it makes no difference who we make fun of. We are all stewing in the same crockpot of furry impetus.

Updated by anonymous

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