Surprise, surprise, our community has a troll. Our troll is using a mobile connection, instead of a land line, and thus his IP-address is ever changing, constrained only by the operators IP pool. We have already suspended couple of his user accounts, and now I suspect he is back with a third. Unfor…

How “changing” are we talking on the IP? If necessary, just block like so: 192.168.1.* or even 192.168.*

This would probably block everyone on that mobile network, though, and will probably fall if they move themselves to another region (temporarily) to continue posting.

Butt-tagging the browser is almost certainly the least-worst way of identifying abusive people who are in that narrow band of “smart enough to change usernames / IPs but not smart enough to switch browsers and/or clear their cookies”. Whether that band contains enough people to make it worthwhile t…

Kane is right - blocking the whole IP-range would block the whole operator, which has around ~35% of local market share. I am not sure what is the situation globally, but on local market ever since the 4G LTE networks came, the operators have strongly favored cellular connections over land lines. T…

Are these trolls using a noticeably similar pattern in email addresses?

Just wanted to share that we were pretty succesful with basic cookie tag in the past (non-IT community) and are planning to use it with Discourse also in the future… As we have completely resigned on using IP addresses for spam prevention I also like the idea of fingerprinting and will look into it…

[image] elijah: Are these trolls using a noticeably similar pattern in email addresses? Well, the individual we are currently dealing with is not. Trolls often have earlier forum experience and are able to invent new unique emails.

Or, if they [image] ljpp: have earlier forum experience they have a bunch of emails already created and ready to use…

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

Support

Topic		Replies	Views
Handling trolls with multiple accounts over VPNs Feature	65	13001	February 3, 2020
Dupe ban accts with same IP not being auto caught anymore Support	18	1920	September 12, 2018
How do you find duplicate accounts Community Building	2	178	July 22, 2025
How to flag account registrations from the same ip? Support	3	1155	December 3, 2019
Managing a Troll Community Building	29	4718	March 9, 2018

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

Related topics