Considering the ongoing discussing I went ahead and made another reading of mprep's unofficial lsit of (official) Bitcointalk rules[1]. Considering the case at hand, the relevant rules that I found were the following (someone correct me if I am wrong):
(...)
18. Having multiple accounts and account sales are allowed, but account sales are discouraged.
(...)
Note: None of the accounts presented by jokers10[2] are banned from the forum so I didn't post the rule number 25. Perhaps one may find more accounts that may be related but as of now it doesn't seem applicable.From my perspective, there are a couple of scenarios (that come to my mind as of now) where the need of having multiple accounts is justified and understandable (but always with transparency regarding it):
- Separating a business concept from the user account - Assuming that a user wants to launch a new business/service in the forum of his conception, and as long as there is transparency on the process, I see as understandable the desire to separate the user account from the business account.
- OPSEC reasons - LoyceMobile[3] is a good example of it. If a user wants to keep up to date with the forum discussion but isn't near their device of trust 24/7, then it makes sense to create a "secondary" account mainly used in a not so secure environment;
- Scrapping tools (by means of a bot) - Self explanatory.
The not so honorable need to have multiple accounts, from my perspective, only boils down to the following:
- Account farming for the purpose of enrolling in signature campaigns;
- Ban evading;
The previous two actions are motivated by ill intentions in either scenario - as both actions break signature campaign rules(1) and the forum rules (#25)[1] - and the people that do end up creating the accounts for these purpose definitely know that what they are doing is wrong (but decide to ignore it with the mantra of "I am too smart to be caught"). As consequences besides banning I know that, depending on the forum, there are different ways to deal with this issue : Either ban entire IP's from countries where this kind of behaviour has a pattern and abuse ( or even banning the usage of TOR and VPN to access the account so that these cases could be detected more easily. As it stands removing VPN and/or TOR usage would be a hit to the freedom of the forum (and the privacy that I, as many, advocate for) so I do not think these are feasible choices.
On this particular case, and after (re)reading the whole thread, the action of both users (or the user) isn't a correct one towards the community. Assuming that all the accounts are from Indonesia, we are talking about a country with a population of 279,204,661[4] (and increasing every second!) - that is the fourth most populous country[5] - and that, somehow, the cosmic event that justifies the connection of these users[2] is that they happen to be just friends[6]? . What would be the odds of it happening right here in the forum in this specific condition?
As for PytagoraZ participation on the contest, the edition that I am running doesn't state rules to deal with this kind of behaviour and I don't know if it would be fair to insert them right now considering the stage of it. I will consider this a lesson learned and, if the next edition happens by me, will surely take this into consideration in order to create a more fair contest amongst everyone.
Overall I tend to agree with GazetaBitcoin perspective (considering that the contest doesn't have a rule for this scenario but I am open to discussion):
But since this is a forum where free speech is encouraged as much as it is possible, this involves also that people can vote for him and his pie. Receiving votes may look abnormal or immoral but, since no contest rules are broken, I don't think there is anything which can be done.
There is still a lot of time to vote and I highly encourage anyone to vote (it's free!) since I believe we have some great entries on this year edition and that this event shouldn't let other contestants feel that they are being damaged in any way... I will update my second post on the voting thread alerting users for this situation as I believe that is the only thing that I can do as of now. The decision will rest upon each user interpretation of the whole situation.
PS: Thank you for bringing this issue to my attention @GazetaBitcoin.
[1]
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/unofficial-list-of-official-bitcointalkorg-rules-guidelines-faq-703657[2]
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63813270[3]
https://bitcointalksearch.org/user/loycemobile-1903546[4]
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/indonesia-population/[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia[6]
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.63813430