Multiple Accounts and Different Personas

[Reverie]

What are your thoughts when a member joins your forum, and then joins again with a different persona? Do you allow this, do you ban the 2nd account immediately? There are a few people around the foruming community lately that I've observed making two to three different persona accounts... It seems exhausting honestly. Have you not personally seen this on your community? Would it bother you to know as a member that you are talking to the same person possibly but with different accounts?

 

[Mike301]

This shouldn't be allowed at all unless it is requested to the admins with clear purpose.
The community is about trust. Having multiple accounts is not a sign of trust at all.

 

[Buddy]

It probably shouldn't be controlled. People deserve their privacy. They could have a health condition or just be exploring different sides of their personality. They shouldn't have to disclose health information to staff in order to have permission to feel comfortable in our community.

I'm probably going to look over that rule in my community because I'm pretty sure we have an account limit.

 

[MrDawn]

The community is about trust. Having multiple accounts is not a sign of trust at all.

I don't like it when people play games and make 20 different accounts to mess with people. I'd rather those particular people keep one account and one account only.

 

[Reverie]

It probably shouldn't be controlled. People deserve their privacy. They could have a health condition or just be exploring different sides of their personality. They shouldn't have to disclose health information to staff in order to have permission to feel comfortable in our community.

I'm probably going to look over that rule in my community because I'm pretty sure we have an account limit.

This is a fair point. Perhaps someone who is struggling and trying to figure out who they are and etc is a big reason for that. I hadn't seen that point of view and I appreciate you mentioning it.

 

[Buddy]

I don't like it when people play games and make 20 different accounts to mess with people. I'd rather those particular people keep one account and one account only.

Perhaps, but in that case you're applying a bandaid on top of an underlying problem, which limits legitimate uses for the sake of treating the abusers.

I like to call this, emergence of scars. We see this often in society and everywhere, when a system is mutated to attempt to prevent something that went wrong from happening again.

A specific rule instead of blanket banning multiple accounts could be: "If you make multiple accounts to mess with people you will be limited to 1 account, get an infraction and have all extra accounts deleted."

How do we apply this logic to kinder egg surprise? I don't know. It started as a slightly challenging reward to open, with delicious chocolate and a hidden brightly coloured egg surprise inside. Because of kids putting the egg in their mouth and choking on it, it turned into an extremely easy to open chocolate, with a poorly coloured surprise egg inside that just makes me super sad and disappointed.

 

[Kale]

I knew someone who did this but on the chat room I was a member of for many years. She finally got called out and caught on this. She made up so many different personas it felt like Roger from American Dad. I spoke to that person years later on Facebook, and she did apologize to me even though I suspected it. No one listened and I found it funny how their personas/accounts would logout all at once, or she'd wait a few mins before her other accounts logged out.

 

[Maria]

I don't allow multiple accounts in my community, however, I know a lot of people allow multiple accounts in their communities. These community owners are trying to build an active community by allowing a member use multiple accounts. I have nothing to say against them.

 

[Nomad]

I have worked on multiple sites with multiple personas (I created multiple accounts because the owner asked me to do it). When I start a community, I also try to create multiple accounts with different persona. It is really difficult to keep up with the persona. Sometimes you get mixed up.