Automatically add a staff note to two users when found to be sharing an IP address

Feature
1

Feature suggestion: automatically add a staff note to two users when found to be sharing an IP address.

2

That could happen a lot depending on how many usres are on the same network (Corporate / Dorm network / etc)

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3

For that reason the suggested feature might be inappropriate for some forums. But it’d be very useful for mine.

I wonder if there is some “registry” of IP addresses that are commonly shared by users? When writing IP-linking code for a different website, I looked out for certain mobile networks (in the reverse DNS lookup), and avoided recording links between users if their IPs belonged to a mobile network. This really helped keep the data clean and useful, and was fairly trivial to maintain.

[mods: please feel free to split this convo off into a separate topic if you wish]

4

Not really needed, the existing admin ip lookup dialog will show other accounts with the same ip.

5

Agree that the existing admin IP lookup is a partial solution - but with two serious limitations:

  • the IP dialog only shows users whose registration / most recent IPs are currently shared. An IP share may be fleeting, and therefore go undetected by staff, or may be detected but forgotten.

  • staff have to manually check all the users, all the time if we’re to catch IP sharers. It’s unrealistic to expect this of busy moderators

If a staff note were to be added automatically for IP sharers, it would serve as an alert to staff, because the presence of staff notes is highlighted by an icon next to the user avatar.

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