Well, as a moderator here, my personal responsibility and power here is solely limited to moderating posts/threads, and more recently, the banning of spammers. We (moderators) cannot check IPs (hence sockies), read PM's, query the database, give out scammer tags, and everything else.
That said, I do not have any meatspace ties with either of the other moderating team, and Garr here, and have never met with them in person at all. I'm living in the other part of the world right now, and while I would like to meet many of those from this forum, my geographical location restricts me from doing so. I certainly won't, and will not act against my own beliefs otherwise, and it is downright illogical and wrong to assume that I will obey everything here if theymos is off his rocker.
Also, while I am against of the entire notion of having alts/sockies here, I can certainly understand it that it would be downright impossible to ban such accounts especially with the advent of VPN's and TOR. It's better to state clearly that the forum is not against and actively catching alt-account users, then to give newbies a false sense of security thinking that the alt account issue is under control here. (which it is not, of course)
* God, I'd like to sticky the first paragraph with all of the requests I've been getting.
Alt accounts are useful in some cases, and they can't be effectively banned anyway. People can always use Tor to evade detection. So banning alt accounts outright would hurt good people more than bad people.
If I happen to see someone abusing alt accounts to break forum rules or scam, I will do something about it. BCB and others know that I am often helpful in these matters. But it's impossible to catch even a majority of abusive alt accounts (especially since very few people have access to IP logs for privacy reasons), so it's best for people to stay on their guard and assume that scammers using alt accounts won't be caught.
It would definitely be better to state clearly the forums policy on alt accounts... if I had never read this thread, I would have never believed this to be the policy. ( I would also have saved many hours of my life
). It really creates an entirely different environment in my mind and I would have handled myself a lot differently when using this forum.
I completely understand its impossible to stop/eliminate, but I just wish I could change theymos's quote above to say "If I happen to see someone abusing alt accounts, I will label the accounts with 'fake' or 'untrustworthy' or 'shady'." as opposed to just waiting for them to be caught doing something (if they are even caught)... I guess I am just not seeing the positive in not taking any action when discovering it. Deceitfulness may be 'useful', but it doesn't make it right.
That being said, it isn't my forum. It is what it is.
) in cases where Atlas Shrugged is open to interpretation? 
