How to reliably identify a troll with suspected multiple user accounts?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) A fermé ce sujet ()]

Consolidating discussion here

Handling trolls with multiple accounts over VPNs

Hey all, we’re seeing an increase in troll users (usually users that have been suspended in the past for abusing other members) over on our Discourse forum. We can usually establish when it’s a troll account based on their email address and their source IP and deal with it, but sometimes it’s not until they make a thread with more abusive content that we see it isn’t a “real” account. I’ve already tried a few wildcard IP bans based on some DigitalOcean IPs (our trolls tend to use VPNs, most of …