Baron and Co. Thanks for having this board as a means for these hard working traders to communicate and share ideas with each other. However, like all good resources, especially where the membership is free, a pervasive disease has arisen whcich can seriously cripple a board's reputation and usefulness. I am talking about the disease known as ... sockpuppets! Sockpuppetitus is a naturally occurring phenomenon of free message boards where one bad cell (poster or member) multiplies and multiplies until the message board is congested and crippled with useless, sometimes damaging diatribes. It takes away from the mission of this board and distracts everyone from it's true purpose. What's worse, the added bs that results from all these sockpuppets sucks up bandwidth and server space. (Didn't you just spend more than 5 figures upgrading and adding servers a few months ago?) It becomes a virus that eventually cripples the host (ET) Now, you can say that I can use protection and wear gloves when coming here (pls feel free to use any other latex analogy you are more apt to think of), putting the offending puppets in the ignore box, but a) my ignore list is getting rather long, and b) it takes a few read posts to realize that I am dealing with an infected sockpuppet. A simpler approach would be a vaccine in the form of IP restriction. Since you, Baron, are responsible for the programming of this board, does this software have a feature where you can limit the number of id's that are created from a particular IP address. It seems like this is built on vBilletin, and I know there is such a feature. I know this wouldn't be a cure-all as this virus can always find another ip to get an account, but it will cut down on all the Jekyll and Hyde's we seem to have here. Case in point, a new member, joined yesterday, already has almost 100 postings which primarily attack another member of this board. It would also cut down on the shill postings if can't create multiple handles. Like I said, I know it wouldn't be perfect, but it would cut down on alot of the crap that goes on here and maybe elevate the board to it's own lofty goals. Thx.
Baron please consider this suggestion. The signal to noise ratio is falling faster than the US$... you have a good board, please protect it.
Yes, we implement restrictions via IP, email, and cookies. The downside of course, is that certain users who are computer savvy, have no life, and have plenty of time, can certainly get around all those restrictions if they really want to.
Absolutely agree. In this day and age of I.P. anonymizers it's too easy to have an endless array of I.P. addresses. But there's a great discussion started here with hcour's post. One of the ideas is a one-time charge of $1 for lifetime membership to ET. The dollar itself is not a filter, as everybody will pay something that ridiculously small, it's the linking of the payment to a credit card/Paypal account. That's the key as there are no easy anonymizers for credit card/Paypal accounts, and besides then you are talking about criminal fraud which I doubt the disrupters are willing to risk just to post here. In short, the only way to be effective against the computer savvy trolls is to link their registration to something they can't easily change.
Well since it seems that the less-than-reticent poster prompting this change would be reluctant to give up his cc/paypal info, them I'm all for it. So is my sockpuppet above.