Hey there.
So as the title implies, 5 days ago I received a mail telling me I'm not allowed to "buffer votes". Having never done that before, I went and checked which post it was about, and came accross a comment from saladshooter (https://e621.net/users/1476193) noticing we have the same profile picture and making a joke about it.
An admin (Rainbow Dash) noticed it two days after his comment and immediately banned the guy, while giving me a neutral record for using alts to buffer votes. I then quoted his comment telling him he got it wrong, and while I don't care much about a neutral record, someone got perma-banned over this. Since the admin is playing dead, again that was 5 days ago and he's been online since, I'm posting here in the hopes another staff member will fix this.

The battleground: post #3966073

I'll remove your record, because apparently you weren't part of that slew of vote cheaters. It should surprise no one that those posts get a lot of raiders. Sorry about that.

As for that other guy. Oh he's totally a vote cheat ban evader. If you must know:

He "started" with this account, got caught.

Made the account you mentioned, got caught.

Made yet another account just a few hours after that ban and....immediately started vote farming again. And that's just a few notable accounts of many more.

As for why I didn't respond to you, well you left a comment on an image and contrary to popular belief, I am not everywhere at once. The fastest way to contact me would be to just send me a message directly on site or on discord. I'm here every day.

lance_armstrong said:
The battleground: post #3966073

Jesus christ...

rainbow_dash said:
I'll remove your record, because apparently you weren't part of that slew of vote cheaters. It should surprise no one that those posts get a lot of raiders. Sorry about that.

As for that other guy. Oh he's totally a vote cheat ban evader. If you must know:

He "started" with this account, got caught.

Made the account you mentioned, got caught.

Made yet another account just a few hours after that ban and....immediately started vote farming again. And that's just a few notable accounts of many more.

As for why I didn't respond to you, well you left a comment on an image and contrary to popular belief, I am not everywhere at once. The fastest way to contact me would be to just send me a message directly on site or on discord. I'm here every day.

This brings up some interesting questions.

How do you determine whether or not someone's account is an alt?

Do you compare IP addresses? Which staff members have access to users' IPs? Do you take into consideration that many people share the same IP addresses these days due to free VPNs having a very limited pool?

Did Nick Furry share an IP address with this person, or did you just assume they were an alt because they upvoted the same things in a short timeframe? It's not an uncommon occurrence for many people to follow a link posted in a Discord or somewhere else and all vote on the same messages at the same time, so hopefully that isn't relied upon as a metric.

I looked through the accounts you listed, and... it doesn't really add up.

Abscondler was a long-standing account with no reported history of vote-cheating until the day they were permabanned for it.
FishyVap was an account that existed a year prior to the vote-cheating ban.

Why would they create an alt and then wait an entire year to start vote-cheating with it? Why go through all that effort just to add 1 whole extra vote to your message while defending some artist against allegations?

The 'evidence' they provided is that one of the two users posted screenshots from the public e621 Discord server without being in it... A few problems with that.
1.) This at best means that they joined the e621 Discord under a different account (is that not allowed?). Or, someone else could've been talking about the incident with other people in a different chatroom and posted screenshots, to which this user took and shared on the image itself.
2.) Even if this user did join the Discord server from an alt, how does this incriminate the other user in any way?

To me, it just looks the admin goofed up by taking down an image over false claims, it got passed down through the grape vine, and then these two started defending the image after hearing about it, before receiving retaliation for it.

And then how is saladshooter tied to this in any way?
I would give you the benefit of the doubt, if you didn't just mistakenly implicate a perfectly innocent person for the same exact thing (and still haven't cleared their note). How do we know you're not just being overzealous in your assumptions and then covering for your own mistakes?

I hope this doesn't come off as rude or antagonistic, that's not my intention. I just feel like there's some heedlessness in administrative action that needs to be addressed. People should not be getting accused and punished for something they had no part in, and if it's this easy to get someone labeled as an alt, what's to stop bad actors from abusing this to get someone they don't like banned?

Anyway, hopefully I don't get labeled as an alt next for raising concerns about this. For the record, I'm a fan of Carpetwurm's art, and found this post by reading through the comments on one of his images. I am not Nick Furry's alt.

dragonslurpr34 said:
This brings up some interesting questions.

How do you determine whether or not someone's account is an alt?

Do you compare IP addresses? Which staff members have access to users' IPs? Do you take into consideration that many people share the same IP addresses these days due to free VPNs having a very limited pool?

Did Nick Furry share an IP address with this person, or did you just assume they were an alt because they upvoted the same things in a short timeframe? It's not an uncommon occurrence for many people to follow a link posted in a Discord or somewhere else and all vote on the same messages at the same time, so hopefully that isn't relied upon as a metric.

I looked through the accounts you listed, and... it doesn't really add up.

IP addresses, emails, etc all lined up without a doubt.

Abscondler was a long-standing account with no reported history of vote-cheating until the day they were permabanned for it.
FishyVap was an account that existed a year prior to the vote-cheating ban.

Why would they create an alt and then wait an entire year to start vote-cheating with it? Why go through all that effort just to add 1 whole extra vote to your message while defending some artist against allegations?

I don't know why people do the things they do, but it's not even the weirdest thing I've seen. I didn't ban Abscondler, I banned FishyVap.

The 'evidence' they provided is that one of the two users posted screenshots from the public e621 Discord server without being in it... A few problems with that.
1.) This at best means that they joined the e621 Discord under a different account (is that not allowed?). Or, someone else could've been talking about the incident with other people in a different chatroom and posted screenshots, to which this user took and shared on the image itself.
2.) Even if this user did join the Discord server from an alt, how does this incriminate the other user in any way?

I don't know anything about discord joins or messages. I banned them off of what I found on the site and nothing else.

To me, it just looks the admin goofed up by taking down an image over false claims, it got passed down through the grape vine, and then these two started defending the image after hearing about it, before receiving retaliation for it.

That image has been up the whole time though?

And then how is saladshooter tied to this in any way?
I would give you the benefit of the doubt, if you didn't just mistakenly implicate a perfectly innocent person for the same exact thing (and still haven't cleared their note). How do we know you're not just being overzealous in your assumptions and then covering for your own mistakes?

Found them via IP search, no VPN, and email matched. I do make mistakes, and I fix them. I forgot about the neutral mark, but it's cleared now.

I hope this doesn't come off as rude or antagonistic, that's not my intention. I just feel like there's some heedlessness in administrative action that needs to be addressed. People should not be getting accused and punished for something they had no part in, and if it's this easy to get someone labeled as an alt, what's to stop bad actors from abusing this to get someone they don't like banned?

Anyway, hopefully I don't get labeled as an alt next for raising concerns about this. For the record, I'm a fan of Carpetwurm's art, and found this post by reading through the comments on one of his images. I am not Nick Furry's alt.

We have a lot of transparency on this site, and if my actions are ever that far in question you can report it and have the lead look at it. I hold no grudge against anyone here.

rainbow_dash said:
I didn't ban Abscondler, I banned FishyVap.

It says knottycurls banned them both... Did you mean saladshooter?

rainbow_dash said:
I don't know anything about discord joins or messages. I banned them off of what I found on the site and nothing else.

I'm just going by what was said in their ban reasons and the comments section. I'm not sure if you were even involved in their bans.

rainbow_dash said:
That image has been up the whole time though?

Oh, it has? An admin mentioned in the comments something about restoring the image, so I assumed the whole argument stemmed from the image being flagged/removed.

Anyway, thanks for your response. I can't really prove/disprove any of this, but it's at least nice to have some form of documentation.

dragonslurpr34 said:
This brings up some interesting questions.

How do you determine whether or not someone's account is an alt?

Do you compare IP addresses? Which staff members have access to users' IPs? Do you take into consideration that many people share the same IP addresses these days due to free VPNs having a very limited pool?

IP addresses are just the start, nowadays. But as mods mentioned, they will work more often than not.
I had all kinds of problems because my phone was on Visible.com's IP pool, and thus Verizon (of Yahoo mail server infamy) IP pool, wouldn't even be allowed on CF instances used by sites like FanFiction.net or furry booru. They had them set to a really strict ISP blocking because... obvious reasons. Yahoo (no !) has always sucked at abuse handling. Verizon is not really any different.

It's kind of not the place to describe them all, but there's tons of other ways to identify same users, without even knowing who they are. Hilariously, in old days on a game server, we used times they were active and writing patterns. ;) Interestingly, that's kind of like trick for identifying plagiarism. Twitch now is basically blocking anyone that doesn't let them spy on everything their browser does, BTW.

rainbow_dash said:
I'll remove your record, because apparently you weren't part of that slew of vote cheaters. It should surprise no one that those posts get a lot of raiders. Sorry about that.

As for that other guy. Oh he's totally a vote cheat ban evader. If you must know:

He "started" with this account, got caught.

Made the account you mentioned, got caught.

Made yet another account just a few hours after that ban and....immediately started vote farming again. And that's just a few notable accounts of many more.

As for why I didn't respond to you, well you left a comment on an image and contrary to popular belief, I am not everywhere at once. The fastest way to contact me would be to just send me a message directly on site or on discord. I'm here every day.

Yeah sorry about that, I forgot e6 doesn't tell you when someone quotes you and I was a bit upset about the whole thing
I did notice there was only one comment on their account, but I didn't think they were an actual alt..

Well, in any case, thanks for removing the record !

dragonslurpr34 said:
It says knottycurls banned them both... Did you mean saladshooter?

I'm just going by what was said in their ban reasons and the comments section. I'm not sure if you were even involved in their bans.

Oh, it has? An admin mentioned in the comments something about restoring the image, so I assumed the whole argument stemmed from the image being flagged/removed.

Anyway, thanks for your response. I can't really prove/disprove any of this, but it's at least nice to have some form of documentation.

Oh, yes. Knotty banned the original accounts, that's what I meant. I banned the new alts after finding them.

alphamule said:
we used times they were active and writing patterns.

Sketchy profiling is exactly what I'm worried about. Way too easy to make assumptions and accuse innocent people, like Nick here.

Websites can collect all sorts of information from the browser (User Agent, window size, certain hardware specs, etc.), but this info is unreliable and easily spoofed, and really shouldn't be relied upon. It's also a legal concern if you collect this data without explicitly mentioning it in your privacy policy. I remember hearing that PrimeLeap got in trouble for that exact reason, after the owner got caught admitting to using such info to ban people, despite no mention of it in their privacy policy.

rainbow_dash said:
Oh, yes. Knotty banned the original accounts, that's what I meant. I banned the new alts after finding them.

Figured, just wanted to make sure.

dragonslurpr34 said:
Sketchy profiling is exactly what I'm worried about. Way too easy to make assumptions and accuse innocent people, like Nick here.

Websites can collect all sorts of information from the browser (User Agent, window size, certain hardware specs, etc.), but this info is unreliable and easily spoofed, and really shouldn't be relied upon. It's also a legal concern if you collect this data without explicitly mentioning it in your privacy policy. I remember hearing that PrimeLeap got in trouble for that exact reason, after the owner got caught admitting to using such info to ban people, despite no mention of it in their privacy policy.

Figured, just wanted to make sure.

We don't collect fingerprinting here, no need. Just the normal things like IP and whatever. We also don't normally ban people on suspicion of writing pattern alone.

dragonslurpr34 said:
Sketchy profiling is exactly what I'm worried about. Way too easy to make assumptions and accuse innocent people, like Nick here.

Websites can collect all sorts of information from the browser (User Agent, window size, certain hardware specs, etc.), but this info is unreliable and easily spoofed, and really shouldn't be relied upon. It's also a legal concern if you collect this data without explicitly mentioning it in your privacy policy. I remember hearing that PrimeLeap got in trouble for that exact reason, after the owner got caught admitting to using such info to ban people, despite no mention of it in their privacy policy.

Figured, just wanted to make sure.

User agent is explicitly mentioned in the privacy policy here, and it even mentions "to ensure the security of the site".
The other fingerprinting parts you mentioned would have to be sent by the javascript, which would be found; browsers don't include those in requests on their own.

rainbow_dash said:
We don't collect fingerprinting here, no need. Just the normal things like IP and whatever. We also don't normally ban people on suspicion of writing pattern alone.

To be fair, it was a PVP strategy game with guilds. Like IRL, everyone had spies and counteragents. XD
Yeah, Facebook's shadow profiles were the usual BS dickery that deserve to get smacked down hard. Oh, never even been to the site or created an account and agreed to it? We'll just DO IT ANYWAYS. Tracky McCreepmeister tactics.

rainbow_dash said:
We don't collect fingerprinting here, no need. Just the normal things like IP and whatever. We also don't normally ban people on suspicion of writing pattern alone.

scth said:
User agent is explicitly mentioned in the privacy policy here, and it even mentions "to ensure the security of the site".

So they do or don't collect fingerprinting here? I'm confused.