A curious pattern

[Honorem 219]

So, just a light-hearted story about a serial lurker.

 

They create a character, post a greetings message. The topic is always filled with warm welcomes and encouragement regarding how cool their characters look, etc. They always reply to the warm welcomes with stuff like 'thanks, looking forward to diving in!' and other enthusiastic stuff.

 

But then the end of the day comes. The end of the day = the end of the stay. Poof, they disappear into thin air.

 

A month later, a 'new' member appears to do the same routine. Check IP, same as before.

 

As it stands now, this lurker has created 18 separate accounts and posted an intro topic on each of them. The farthest they've ever gotten was completing an app and having it approved, then doing nothing further.

 

I am flattered they keep coming back to my site though, LOL! No harm done but yes, it's strange. It's at the point now that when we get a newbie, I check the IP to see if it's our old friend.

 

How about you guys? Any curious, odd or funny stories regarding lurkers?

[Hysteria 56]

Ironically I've been on the opposite side of this. Sometimes sites don't give the right impression so I end up leaving, but the site itself seems really cool, so I wind up coming back. I want to give the site another chance to "impress me" or give me a reason to think it would be a good place to dedicate my time and energy to. Roleplay is something that eats up a lot of our day when we're not doing things we have to, because it's giving life to a character or concept in a setting we know nothing about. Now, sometimes when I come back I still don't get that good impression so I'll leave and wait a couple months and try again if I happen to really like the setting. If by the third time it's still not the atmosphere I think I'd enjoy, I give up on it and look for something else entirely. I'm not saying that someone should try a site eighteen times, but someone coming in to scope every so often before making a final decision isn't necessarily a bad thing.

[Icewolf 258]

It is a strange thing to do. I get people making an account and everything, and posting an intro. I even get if they decide to leave before starting properly, and then coming back later, but making a new account, and possibly pretending to be a new person repeatedly (I'm assuming that they are pretending that they are new, so you can correct me on that.) is a red flag for me. It's because I've had people on twitter make new accounts that I've played with previously that I had a problem with and only finding out later that they are that person. I can get someone doing it once, where they join, don't stick around long and decide later that they want to give it another go and make a new account (most likely because they forgot or lost the log-in details of the previous account) but numerous times? I don't understand it.Sock puppet accounts (which is what this could be called!) is usually done to disrupt a forum and it's a funny situation for your site to be in because you don't want to ban people if they've not caused a problem (which I'm assuming they havn't in this case) but the behaviour is annoying.

[Hysteria 56]

4 hours ago, Icewolf said:

It is a strange thing to do. I get people making an account and everything, and posting an intro. I even get if they decide to leave before starting properly, and then coming back later, but making a new account, and possibly pretending to be a new person repeatedly (I'm assuming that they are pretending that they are new, so you can correct me on that.) is a red flag for me. It's because I've had people on twitter make new accounts that I've played with previously that I had a problem with and only finding out later that they are that person. I can get someone doing it once, where they join, don't stick around long and decide later that they want to give it another go and make a new account (most likely because they forgot or lost the log-in details of the previous account) but numerous times? I don't understand it.Sock puppet accounts (which is what this could be called!) is usually done to disrupt a forum and it's a funny situation for your site to be in because you don't want to ban people if they've not caused a problem (which I'm assuming they havn't in this case) but the behaviour is annoying.

 

Yeah pretending to be someone your not is a line I wouldn't cross. Seems pointless and disingenuine. Wouldn't sock puppet accounts be enough of a reason to ban someone if you had proof behind it? I doubt members would be bothered knowing someone they never knew or wrote with was banned for reasons X & Y. So what would be stopping someone from doing it?

[CovertSphinx 710]

Remember too, that the person in question  might be embarrassed to admit that they're the same person coming back 2, 3, 4, even 5 times to try a site they like. As if their inability (for whatever reason) to jump in and immediately flourish like a weed in a dirt field somehow makes them inferior or would make them looked down upon from the get-go. It could easily be a "Hey I really wanna get involved here...but I keep not having the time or energy...but it's awesome...and oh Dear Lord I hope they don't know it's me and hate me for being so flaky before I even joined!" kind of anxiety. 

[Honorem 219]

On 7/6/2018 at 9:19 PM, Icewolf said:

It is a strange thing to do. I get people making an account and everything, and posting an intro. I even get if they decide to leave before starting properly, and then coming back later, but making a new account, and possibly pretending to be a new person repeatedly (I'm assuming that they are pretending that they are new, so you can correct me on that.) is a red flag for me. It's because I've had people on twitter make new accounts that I've played with previously that I had a problem with and only finding out later that they are that person. I can get someone doing it once, where they join, don't stick around long and decide later that they want to give it another go and make a new account (most likely because they forgot or lost the log-in details of the previous account) but numerous times? I don't understand it.Sock puppet accounts (which is what this could be called!) is usually done to disrupt a forum and it's a funny situation for your site to be in because you don't want to ban people if they've not caused a problem (which I'm assuming they havn't in this case) but the behaviour is annoying.

No you're not mistaken. They are pretending to be new every time. Sometimes it's less than a week before another account is made.

Edited July 10, 2018 by Honorem

[Sage 289]

Maybe reach out to them and ask if there's anything you can do to help? I've dealt with this before, where I send them a message that just basically says "Hey there! I've seen you around a couple times, making character accounts, and I'd really love for you to join in the community. Is there anything we can do to help you stick around?" Sometimes these messages have been ignored, but sometimes I get a great response back, usually something like "My life is really busy right now and I'm trying to make time, but I keep getting pulled away and lose muse. I'm super embarrassed that I keep joining so I've been changing my alias." At that point, I mirror their enthusiasm and offer to move them into the inactive/lurker member group until they know they're ready to join for real, no hard feelings. I usually invite them into the discord/other chat client to help them get engaged too.

 

Alternatively, for repeat offenders who haven't responded to my messages, I'll ban. They're essentially spamming the board. I tell them what's going to happen in the message I send them - if you don't respond in x days, your IP is gonna get banned.

 

All that said, I've also been that person. Back when I was an immature rper who only joined sites and never rp'd. I didn't know how to get into the community or really start playing, so I'd just keep starting over like an idiot. The character (and persona) creation process was enough for me. Idk why. But it sounds like this person may just be very immature.

[Icewolf 258]

21 hours ago, Honorem said:

No you're not mistaken. They are pretending to be new every time. Sometimes it's less than a week before another account is made.

 

That would seem fishy to me. If there was a long time between them, then I'd just think that they'd forgot their password/loss access to their e-mail or log in details. The pretending to be someone new is something that you shouldn't put up with because I know how bad it can get when you have an rper like that. (It wasn't on a forum, but they did create a lot of damage in the end.) At best, it just seems like they are spamming your board, but pretending to be someone different each time is a worse problem.

[valucre 19]

It's actually kind of wild how closely this describes some behavior I've seen on our own site. We have a rule against sockpuppet accounts when people try to use them maliciously, like to access new member only areas or to get around ignore lists from other members, but if someone is just having some roleplay under a new name we usually don't care. That changes when a member will make literally 12 accounts doing what OP said here - registering, saying hi, getting warm welcomes, starting some roleplay, and then leaving without a word before making a new account. We had to have a talk with that member because while that isn't harmful in a direct, malicious sense, it does hurt the overall RP when someone involves themselves in multiple threads and then stalls all those stories meanwhile other players are waiting around wondering what happened to them 

[Huskerdust 625]

Back when I ran Tellius, we had this problem. Somebody just kept signing up over and over again. At first, I didn't even realize it was the same person. I just thought we were getting a lot of flakes. We would have members joining up, making 1-3 characters, doing a couple posts, disappearing, and then a new member would show up and do the same thing. It wasn't until like a year later when I was going through old accounts to see who to delete that I realized that a vast majority of those new accounts had the same IP! I sent their newest accounts PMs to ask what was going on. No response but a few weeks later, they did it again. So I just banned the IP and went on with life. It was definitely weird. No harm, but it was getting bothersome to deal with. 

[Sage 289]

On 7/21/2018 at 11:23 AM, valucre said:

We had to have a talk with that member because while that isn't harmful in a direct, malicious sense, it does hurt the overall RP when someone involves themselves in multiple threads and then stalls all those stories meanwhile other players are waiting around wondering what happened to them 

 

It also hurts your forum statistics. I don't know if anybody else even cares about this kind of thing, but I love tracking my board's stats. I like knowing how many registered accounts we have, how many posts we have, how much we've improved over the last x months, how many new members we've gotten, etc. I even track our google analytics stats, like how my users are accessing the forum (computer or mobile?), where they're located in the world, what pages they stay on the longest, etc. These stats help me to assess how I can deliver the best forum experience possible to these users, what makes members stay or leave, what practices have been working or not working for us, etc. 

 

But when you have a serial account creator like this, while they're not doing anybody real harm other than stalling some stories, they're hurting my stats and im not getting accurate data from their interactions. So at that point, I'm like naw dude, you're getting banned. This is bad traffic and you're helping nobody.