Topic: Alts vs farm. (Read 595 times)

Only reason why I believe so is because a lot of people will start with 1 merit to see if they'll get noticed, and from there, they'd either buy merits from other people or farm shit from their other accounts to commence their artificial rank up missions. So in a sense, what I'm just trying to suppose is that it's hard to either prove or just stop with 1 merit, and yes, you're right, they do look pathetic lol.

In any case, I only meant to make this statement to discourage people from creating alts for any reason besides device convenience. You go out there creating 4 different accounts so you have higher chances of getting merited, and in turn getting into signature campaigns when you can pretty much just combine the efforts you make for those accounts into a single one and not sacrifice the quality of your posts or better yet, be able to provide more constructive content to the forum.

So even though I may have overstated to some, I still believe that I said the right thing here, and I'd die on this hill if I have to LOL.

You overstate. For one given merit, there will be no punishment, except that you will seem pathetic in front of the community. This is what people look like who cannot receive merit on their own on all their accounts, but are engaged in transferring merits purchased or obtained with such difficulty. Otherwise, why would you throw away something that you can get for nothing?
Owning multiple accounts, if we remove the normal reason of convenience for different devices, will also be an indicator of the greed of people who cannot be satisfied with bonuses from one account. But often we see that greed makes a person even poorer; it destroys the personality, making him angry and hostile.

It's generally frowned upon if you have Alt accounts (unless you explicitly state that you do have an alt account like LoyceV does) but the forum doesn't impose any form of restrictions towards having multiple accounts here, as long as it's used within the confines of the forum rules and healthily. Farm accounts which are alternate accounts that people use to farm engagement or in the forum's case, merits and post counts, are illegal and could be a bannable offense if I'm not mistaken, especially if you're using these farm accounts to cycle Smerits to each other and climb the ranks artificially.

There's no particular amount of accounts that will determine whether you're a farmer or not, but in my opinion, the moment you send merits towards yourself from an alt account, even if it's just a single merit, you're already considered a farmer and if reported, could face getting banned from the forum. And yes, even if you don't use it to share merit, or to cheat on campaigns by joining more of your accounts in one go, long as you're considered a farmer here there's no way for you to regain the trust and cred you will lose in the forum.

Well, most signature campaigns I've joined forbid participating with an alt account. But, there have been a few that allowed it.

Having broken the forum rules isn't a prerequisite. This example is a user who has not broken the rules (or at least isn't tagged for that reason), but is still red tagged nonetheless. Sending negative feedback means you're publicly stating that the person is not trustworthy and / or likely to scam.

In a perfect world, yes you can still join but the problem is that we've ostracized and we made it a taboo for alts and users with alts to join a signature campaign and the other thing is that most campaign managers really don't like the idea of someone having another account and they see those people as cheaters that are taking advantage of other people that are honest, I mean that's how I see it. So even if you were to tell the campaign manager that you've got an alt, I still don't think that they've got some reason to let you in on the campaign and I don't think they might even appreciate your honesty.
I wouldn't say that it's unethical to not inform them but it's unethical if you don't inform them and abuse that advantage to your favor, I think that's the more unethical thing, what you've mentioned could be a neutral in terms of ethics. I don't agree that getting paid twice is going to sit right with the people that know that those two accounts have the same person, it's unfair and that position that's got an alt on it could've been a place for someone that's honest and only has one account. No way to justify having two accounts on a campaign even if they're different, it will always be unfair and unethical.

Regarding tagged accounts not being able to join signature campaigns. you can still join a signature campaign even if you have a red tag but it will be entirely depend on the signature campaign rule and the campaign manager, there are campaign managers that consider and still hire accounts even if it has a red tag(I think the severity of the reason for the red tag matters a lot when they hire accounts with red tag).

No, you will not be tagged if you don't broken any rules. And if an account already has a red tag, we can still use it, we just can't join the campaign.

seriously? Cus I thought anyone that joined a campaign with two different accounts ( even in different campaigns) would automatically be tagged a bounty cheater...
what makes it wrong is not creating an awareness about it, But the act isn't condemned still? Make that make sense!!

Thanks LoyceV for this. When I said experienced users to answer me, I wasn't wrong.

Another bold answer and I believe that the wise will learn from this. While the foolish will not. I believe that the forum has no much threads explaining these rules but many people are available to punish offenders.

I wasn't around in 2012, but I guess farming accounts for selling or signatures wasn't a thing back then.

"Getting caught" implies you did something bad. If someone finds your alt (or any other personal information about you), and you're not doing anything wrong, there's no reason to expose your alts.

I was just thinking about this quote when I was reading the thread. Originally theymos' quote was referring to that, for example, if you want to express your political ideas and you don't want to do it with your account. This has been generally tolerated for other purposes, if you want to have two or three accounts and you are able to make money with them as long as you don't break the rules is fine, but it was not the original meaning theymos gave it. Anyway I don't remember anyone getting caught with two or more undeclared alts and not breaking the rules in some way.

You know, for a long time, there were sites that paid pretty decent money for completing certain registrations, surveys, and other tasks. But according to the site's requirements, it was believed that it was necessary to be a unique individual. That is, you must have everything different, including an IP address, browser, device, and, of course, address and name. If all conditions were met, the site paid for each new person on a new device. But this was quite difficult to implement since the site saw all the slightest trackers, including the computer processor and video cards. Nevertheless, people managed to engage in multi-accounts. The browser anti-detect was created for similar purposes, but at that time it cost good money.

I wrote all this as an example of what you are asking about today. Multi-accounts are allowed on the forum, and only detectives who find connections through social networks, transactions, and similar matches are involved in catching them.

I agree that not a single experienced cheater will come and admit how many accounts he has. As long as the forum allows it, you can create hundreds of alternative accounts.

But if the ban is at the hardware level, so that registration is prohibited by matching trackers, the number of accounts will be reduced to one account per device. It's simple. But here we must choose either freedom or uniqueness.

People are not scared to answer these questions. There are certain questions that simply don't have clear-cut or explicit answers because it can depend on other factors and circumstances. For example: Can 5-6 alt accounts be considered a farm? If they were created and used for the purpose of merit abusing, cheating in campaigns and contests, etc., then yes, that would be an account farm.  However, it's not necessarily a definitive sign of a farm. Some members may have a bunch of inactive alt accounts, or use them only for specific needs. So, it depends on a case-by-case basis, and context and usage matter more than the mere number of accounts.

I'll answer:
2. The word "farm" is used for people who rank up many accounts for earning money. I don't think there's a hard limit: 2 accounts isn't a farm, 20 is. Somewhere in between is a gray area. It was a much bigger problem before the introduction of the Merit system, when shitposting in Off-topic was enough to reach Legendary status.
3. Yes. From the forum rules' perspective, I've never seen anyone banned just for owning many accounts. But if one of them gets banned, the rest is guilty of ban evasion. Scams aren't moderated, so Merit sharing and cheating won't get you banned. You could say it's "allowed" from the forum's perspective. But that's where the "alt farm hunters" come in with the red tags.

Allow me to (again) quote theymos on this:

I've used "throw away accounts" just to test something. Create, test, forget. Or this one:
I don't think anyone considers this an alt account, let alone a farm.

This is true.

LoyceV has five or six alts in total - the majority of which are bots and he's also confessed he forgot he had an obscure bot alt at one point.

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To respond to the OP - signature campaign managers will stipulate you can't use an alt in the same campaign - essentially, when caught you loose that week's worth of earnings and are usually slapped with red tags for "breaking the rules"

I think I have explicitly answered the questions you asked. What are you confused about?


It might not be a crime but it's unethical to have multiple alt accounts, have different identities for all of them, and use different Bitcoin addresses and other details to join signature campaigns, and since all your alts would have different identities, you can possibly join the same campaign with all of them and no one would even know about it. You may say that isn't a crime as well, but that is considered cheating, unethical, and not allowed. Apart from all these points, you can do a bunch of unethical stuff such as scamming people, taking loans and not repaying them, etc., and have no fingers pointed at you being the original account holder because all your alts are undeclared and unknown so no one can blame you for any of that.

So, these are all possibilities of having multiple accounts with different identities which you say is not a crime. 

In my personal opinion, all comes down to the intention someone could give to their alternative accounts. Some would use an alternative account to say things which would be politically incorrect for most of the forum members, others will use alternative accounts to throw scam accusations or open threads in the reputation section, without dragging the drama to their main accounts. I do not have much of a problem which those cases, though it is very different when someone use their Alts in order to cheat campaigns, sell accounts or evade bans imposed on them by our moderators.
There are very well known members here in our forum who have known alternative accounts and since they don't truly do anything wrong with those, then there is no problem.
If one wants to have several accounts and keep some level of transparency, the first step would be to disclose those accounts and their control by the same individual on a thread in the reputation section of the forum.

Those are just my two sats, by the way.

Also, on a side note. Anyone who wished to avoid drama and very heated discussion among members, then step into the Reputation section of the forum carefully. 

What I meant was to have an alt account to participate in specific discussions anonymously (maybe you're shy about a particular topic and don't want to expose your main account, as theymos mentioned somewhere) or to play around with a different persona (harmless fun, as long as it's within forum rules), or use alt accounts to access from different devices (for example a "mobile" account, as some members have).

 

For forum rules, as far as I know there isn't a rule that prohibits entering your alt account on signature campaigns, as for signature campaign rules, it might differ from campaign to campaign or the manager that manages the campaign.