Thanks so much for the response!
That seems to be a reasonable assumption. I’m not the actual admin for my site/community, so I’m not sure if there is something about the setup/configuration that might somehow create sporadic/random failure. But I have a hard time imagining something that would create sporadic failure, and not complete failure. Or, at least, routine and regular failure.
Thank you. This is reassuring to us in case we decide to take disciplinary mod action based upon observed IP “proof” that someone has duplicate accounts.
And I hope that I set up my example in a way that communicated how we already vetted the geographic reporting, and also heavily considered the “personalities” and posting history of the members to reach the conclusion that the matching IP’s are all but certainly not benign coincidence.
The only reason why we struggle with that conclusion is that, in the most recent case, we have matching IP’s that just cannot be benign coincidence, but involve two accounts/members that have radically different writing styles and even demeanors. Totally different levels of apparent/seeming literacy and style.
But given that I haven’t found any trace of any discussion for any other Discourse site mods seeing “phantom” IP matches, I guess the more logical conclusion is that we have someone using a residential IP proxy to run alternate accounts. And goes to a great deal of effort in being mindful of maintaining separate personalities.
This probably settles it, but I’m also going to try to dig through some of our mod discussion to review prior discussions of IP matches that we thought were potentially “phantom” ones. And see if there’s any meat to those bones that might be useful to put on the record in this forum.
Thanks again.