On 18/03/07, Ron Ritzman ritzman@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/17/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
Hm. As a rule, checkuser doesn't lie.
Checkuser doesn't lie, but results can easily be misinterpreted.
Agreed. Many people still use ISPs that assign IPs dynamically. This is even true for many DSL and Broadband providers. In such cases the only thing a checkuser will tell you is that both accounts in question are (for example) Comcast users in Chicago or Bellsouth DSL users in Birmingham. A few years ago I was blocked for a month. So was every other user in Atlanta whose ISP used Level3 POPs all thanks to some dickhead called alberuni who was also an earthlink subscriber in Atlanta (or another ISP in Atlanta using Level3 POPs) . If someone suspected me of being a sockpuppet of user:alberuni, a checkuser would likely say I was.
Well, no, maybe not.
An automatic unthinking comparison of the IPs would probably say you were, if it was done by someone half-asleep*. But one of the reasons there are very few people with checkuser access is to ensure that the ones who are there have sufficient clue to look at the IPs and figure out what they mean, then combine that with editing patterns and so on.
Checkuser raw data is one thing, but the result is based on more than just taking a string of numbers and seeing if any of them are the same...