Quote:
Originally Posted by Paedantic Basterd
I don't know how the team is currently dealing with it, but it used to be that if we weren't sure exactly who it was, they were allowed to remain until we were certain. Certainty came through a combination of IP location and site behaviour. Dirty can't resist being Dirty so he was always pretty easy to identify.
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Yea that's pretty much how it was and probably how it still is. The only methods beyond relying on some IP-agnostic cookie-based system that would still be made irrelevant by a simple cookie clearing in the browser or using another computer if that was too hard for someone to figure out, is a reliance on the relative persistence of IP addresses in normal circumstances.
Even then, one only has to use a proxy to break that. So then the effort involves behavior correlation, and if IPs can be traced to proxies then that's more concrete than otherwise. But if they can't, you're down to responding to the potential of a ban bypass based solely on behavior. So really, in any case it comes down to judgement in an appropriate context. Sometimes it's just easier to make the decision when there's concrete evidence.
The saving grace for most decisions in this realm was always the relative lack of tech-savvy users that would get themselves in those crosshairs to begin with. There were definitely some that knew how to get around it. I'd be surprised if some of them weren't still here today.