[wp-forums] Putting 2 accounts in the timeout room

[esmi at quirm dot net]

on 20/05/2014 19:56 Josh Lobe said the following:
> Wow Jan,
> You're good!
> Took me a minute to fully understand what you were talking about.
> Thanks for the lesson :)

Jan is the WPORG Sock Puppet bloodhound. ;-)

> How on earth were you able to put all that together?
> What 'red flags' do you look for?

In the back end of the forums, there's an option to search by IP. It's 
slow but effective if you think you're dealing with a sock puppet.

Depending upon your access level, you can also see IPs for every post in 
a topic,. In the topic that Jan mentioned 
<https://wordpress.org/support/topic/delete-post-in-forum?replies=13&view=all> 
we have two puppet accounts posting to the same topic using the same IP 
address.

Other things to look for:

- a sudden spate of 5 star reviews for a given plugin
- a sudden spate of 1 star reviews for a given plugin
- slightly off-key conversations between two posters extolling the 
virtues of [insert plugin/theme here]*.
- Poster A adopts a slightly "risky" stance (possibly against 1 or 2 
mods) & Poster B suddenly appears from nowhere defending A up to the hilt.

Have I missed anything? ;-)

It's actually quite difficult to define what catches the eye. Possibly a 
certain similarity in posting style? Either way, Jan can spot 'em well 
before the rest of us do.

Mel

* Double brownie points if the topic was originally about a completely 
different [insert plugin/theme here].
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