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Multiple Forum Identities: Fraud is NOT Funny!

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Randrew

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Just out of curiosity:

What's to stop an individual on this forum from creating multiple users, each with a different "personality," and then having them "argue" against one another?

The reason I thought of this is that, while an undergraduate, I was on a Philosophy discussion listserv, and a guy on the discussion list named Earl decided to create an alternate personality for himself ("Pearl," a woman much older than himself), and had the two argue against one another. It took the rest of us a while to find this out (and only because someone he had told spilled the beans.) I think he was trying to emulate an idea of Kierkegaard.

What do you guys think of this (esp. administration)? I doubt anyone on *this* forum would do such a thing, as it would run contrary to the Law of Excluded Middle :pimp:

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Gladly, it's not easy to do this without getting caught. If we suspect someone, we can track his IP, and usually his location - and compare it with any other user's IP.

i do not understand why this is necessarily a bad thing. its just some people having fun and unless it somehow hurts people (?) i dont see why it would be bad.

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i do not understand why this is necessarily a bad thing. its just some people having fun and unless it somehow hurts people (?) i dont see why it would be bad.

The problem is that the "fun" violates a key presumption of the forums -- participation in discussion in good faith. If someone is simply interested in constructing a philosophical argument in dialogue form, they should do so on their own. Doing so in a public forum, while concealing the fact that one is doing so, suggests that the goal is injecting ideas into the public forum under false pretenses.

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We got that all the time over on a board I administrate. There are ways of finding people out...
Inspector, eh?

Go, Gadget, go! :)

i do not understand why this is necessarily a bad thing. its just some people having fun and unless it somehow hurts people (?) i dont see why it would be bad.

The anecdote I mentioned was quite amusing for the entire group involved, and no one was mad when we found out. I wasn't thinking about doing this myself, but I was curious to see if anyone had pulled it off successfully here or elsewhere (if so, then I've caught you!), and I was also wondering what the administration here thought about it (e.g. dislikes it, doesn't care, etc.)

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