Karma Manipulation

[Circuitbenders]

Its come to my attention that someone on here, and i have a pretty good idea who you are, is actually childish enough to go to the ridiculous amount of effort to manipulate other members karma.

Several regular posters have mysteriously lost up to -10 karma points in the last couple of days for absolutely no reason whatsoever that i can see. Possibly some negative karma is deserved here or there but that amount in two days for members who have never previously received ANY negative karma or posted anything that could conceivably annoy anyone? I don't think so.

When you consider that its impossible to give any other member positive or negative karma more than once in an hour you can see just how much effort you'd have to go to in order to achieve this. Whats even more tragic is that whoever is doing this actually thinks that something as random as karma on a forum actually matters enough to spend what must be nearly a whole day to manipulate it!

Anyway, this stops NOW! You will be banned if it carries on no matter who you are.

Obviously everyone feels that negative karma is unjustified, but if you have received a ridiculous amount over the past couple of days let me know and I'll look at your account.

[SineHacker]

I've now had -13 over 48 hours 

[Circuitbenders]

think yourself lucky, i just noticed that gordonjcp had -17 for no apparent reason. 

i've reset your karma again and taken some steps which hopefully might stop this happening

[nochtanseenspecht]

hey i lost karma too  but what do i care.. its not pound sterling anyway

[nochtanseenspecht]

but i do care that i get closer to the meat rather kick like the daddy.. (im vegetarian )

[Gordonjcp]

Did I?  Hmm.

Name and shame, then, so we can all point and laugh...

[ne7]

wow, thats creepy it happened to me too

how much time does this loon-box have on their hands lol

flipping heck *grin*

[Circuitbenders]

well here are some facts, make of them what you will.

The member SK1 appears to post from about 30 different IP's for some reason.
There is another member called 'Soulder' who mysteriously registered from one of the exact same IP's that SK1 uses
The massive amounts of negative karma people were getting stopped the second i banned both SK1 and Soulder from logging in. I only banned those two members and nobody knew they had been banned.
One member affected by this, reported getting random negative karma when only SK1 and 3rdness were online. I can't imagine 3rdness being involved in this nonsense.

Heres an extract from the ban log which shows attempts to log into banned accounts.

IP                        Email address                       Member      Time
65.49.2.21           soulder@yopmail.com            soulder       Today at 12:33:22 AM    
65.49.14.13         soulder@yopmail.com            soulder       Today at 12:31:32 AM    
65.49.14.13         im_fairdinkum@hotmail.com    sk-1           Today at 12:30:58 AM    
203.171.197.149  im_fairdinkum@hotmail.com    sk-1           Today at 12:19:19 AM

SK1 tries to log in from one IP address, then about 10 minutes later tries to log in from another IP. Then a minute later Soulder tries to log in from the SAME IP, then Soulder tries to log in from a new IP. Anyone want to work out the odds against that happening by coincidence?

At 12:37 someone tried to sign up for a new account from another IP used by SK1 from the email bendova666@yopmail.com. If anyone isn't aware, Yopmail is a disposable email address service that masks your real email address


Now who wants to draw some kind of conclusion from all this?

The big question is why? I'm so baffled by the reasoning behind this i'm actually reluctant to come to the obvious conclusion  

[nochtanseenspecht]

...Now who wants to draw some kind of conclusion from all this?

The big question is why? I'm so baffled by the reasoning behind this i'm actually reluctant to come to the obvious conclusion  

perhaps we finaly have a subject here for the contest 
and the winner gets... fresh karma

[ne7]

how strange!

the sheer effort that went into it too...

cheers for sorting it out

[ne7]

PS - a nice positive note is it's reminded me to "applaud" people more on here

[Circuitbenders]

how strange!

the sheer effort that went into it too...

Baffling isn't it. He seemed really enthusiastic and was posting loads and putting up new threads every day while writing lengthy posts rebuking anyone who didn't have his apparent gung ho attitude, and at the same time he appears to have been trying to actively destroy the forum by giving people masses of negative karma under different accounts.

That just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. 

[ne7]

bit of a crying shame really

[SebbeK]

super strange :S

[SineHacker]

I can't believe he managed 100 posts in a little over a fortnight