There’s already a half setting for this, titles “max new accounts per IP”. The only issue with this is it only prevents TL2 and below accounts from doing this. This would prevent TL3/4 users from doing that as well.
My site has a rule against 3 or more IPs. It’s a bit hard to enforce this rule, so this would be really helpful.
This setting would prevent signup from users on an IP if there’s 3 existing accounts. IPs that have staff accounts would be exempt from the limit, but this would be amazing for enforcing this rule.
You mean that you don’t want a single user to have more than 3 accounts? It’s trivial to go to a coffee shop to get a new IP (and there are a zillion other ways to get a different IP while at home in your pajamas if someone wants to bother to try).
I’d say that you’re going to have to enforce this with community rules rather than technology.
Of course I only realized this was feature and not support after I’d writtten the whole message, or I’d not said anything.
But yes, users may only have 3 accounts unless we give them permission.
But at that point, when they get home and login again, the account will be placed under that IP, and something can happen like the account can be flagged under something like “User has created more than 3 accounts under this IP”
Only issue I possibly see with this is if you’re ad something like a convention and 100 people there are logged into the same forum and accounts start getting flagged out do nowhere. At that point it’s probably up to the site moderators to be familiar with their users, but that’s besides the point.
The only non alts here is 2468, Crcoli, Tms, and Solvie. The rest are alts completely exploding my inbox which is not helpful at all.
I like having alts personally when I don’t want to do something on my main account or I need a personal account on places such as Twitter which is why I have always allowed alt accounts, but with this small rule in place.
Three accounts is totally different thing than three IP-addresses. And that is totally different thing than having three or more different users who are sharing same IP.
I’m still confused. Why would you limit registration using IP that is not chosen by users but given by ISP?
I’m living near capital of Finland and I’m client of the biggest ISP here. That means here, at this area, is at least 15 000 customers are under same IP. So three of us could be a member of your community but not the fourth one because of technical solution? What’s the point?
Almost, or every, ISP is using NAT. It is not only routers of households that are giving same public IP to every devices. And that is the strongest point not to limit or control using IP-addresses.
That’s not true, most ISPs have vast blocks of IP ranges and issue one address to each customer device, the NAT occurs behind the local router.
Maybe Finland is different, but there are a total of 14.3M addresses allocated to ranges in the country and a a population of only 5.5 million it seems unlikely. Are you maybe confusing unique public IPs with subnets or ranges?
The below data is pretty old and incomplete, but gives some sense of scale:
