What can be done about using proxy servers?

A new (at least new under his current user name) poster made a series of posts on TS/S today. Some were obscene. Others were personal attacks. One bragged that "This is my third time posting. I will continue to post (via Tor, an anonymizing proxy which others use and therefore can't ban without banning them) until I get an answer. Until then, .... off TSA pedophile sympathizer."

Does FT have a system to identify posters who use proxy servers? If not, perhaps the best answer is not to allow any posts at all from these servers.

There is no point in having a TOS at all if use of a proxy server will allow anyone to get around it.

I think you mean proxy anonymizers

Fair enough, I accept your correction -- but the question remains if anything can be done about them.

Thanks Dov. While we can track down IP addresses, it's really not a typical or proactive measure in the everyday life of FlyerTalk and a members choice of access to the Internet including proxy anonymizers remains that of the member themselves. We only get involved with members at this level when they show an incompatibility to play well with others. We have some members who because of personal or professional reasons do use proxy anonymizers, but participate on FlyerTalk at the same level as overwhelming most other members do�to talk miles, points and travel.

This has really become one of the many, along with keeping spammers out, tasks of our volunteer Moderators and along with the assistance of our members, we're fairly quick and active to remove the individual's that provide the kind of dialogue that you reference.

The topic of banning access to FlyerTalk via proxy anonymizers actually has been brought up before�all the way back in 2003 and was brought up by one of our Moderators, skofarrell. At that time there was no real consensus of support for such a ban, with many pointing out that the prevalence of such services really is not an easy one to track down and as well that there are many legitimate reasons to use them, mostly work related, etc.

My guess is that such a ban really needs to be analyzed by Internet Brands and as well researched with their experience on such problems from the more than 100 other Web sites that they own and manage.

While we do have an occasional problem with these situations, I can easily point out that the same problem exists with members who don't use proxy anonymizers to log onto FlyerTalk and the problem has always been managing members who seem to have some sort of problem playing well with others and in the case of the example you note, it's playing well with the authority of the TSA and FlyerTalk just seems to be a viable soapbox to them, though like you, we sure wish they would pick another street corner on this one.

Appreciate any additional feedback from you on this. Thanks.

I am afraid not. At least not on FT.

I want to make it clear. My post is not about moderation, in case I fail to deliver my (tech) points. Speaking from personal experience, I've been seeing another person popping up with different FT handles every couple of weeks since late 2007 in different fora, mostly Asia related. What he's been doing is registering a new FT handle once the "current" one is suspended. Trust me, he's hard to miss and never changes his posting "style." He usually "earns" his suspensions in less than a month, if not weeks. The fora frequents get to identify him very fast. I personally "witness" at least 8 handles by him. He probably has more aliases by now.

I had numerous PM exchanges with our Tech Front to report what I'd seen in a period of maybe 18 months. I raised the same question if FT could've done something more aggressively to block said user. I think I CCed one or two of my PMs to Randy as well.

What I did learn is said user was/is quite tech-savvy. I didn't get any direct response from Mikel about the solution but I think the answer's clear when seeing the same vicious user over and over and over again.

It was so frustrating for me, a non-techie, to see my RBPs w/r/t said user getting nowhere. It's impossible to put someone on Igore when you don't know which new aliases will be coming. I don't know if said user is still around since I am no stalker.

If our tech department and/or IB does have some tools under the belt to deal with such annoyance & disruption, I'd love to hear it too. You don't have to spill the (tech) beans. I just need to know you guys have it under control.

I'd take the q. there at this point and see what the response is.

I had.

As a matter of fact, my threads were removed and discussion taken privately via our tech department due to the poster involved. Since I am not (actively) pursuing solutions, I haven't raised the same concern over the same poster.

I am not sure if said poster was/is using proxy anonymizers to register multiple handles one suspension after another. But in my non-techie eyes, what this person did is similar, if not the same, to what Dov is talking about. The one in Dov scenario is much more mean-spirited though.

I assume there must be a good reason why Dov started this seemingly techie thread in ORP, instead of Technical Issues Forum. I was just chiming in with what I knew and learned with multiple registrations of such kind without touching moderation. I have no problem if Dov prefers to pursue further in Technical Issues Forum.

hi guys,

ive been coming to FT occasionally over the years when directed to a thread some other deal site from time to time but i just registered now, cause im hoping to do more traveling in the near future =)

anyway, i dont think the solution to this lies in IP tracking or filtering or anything along those lines. cause like the offending poster said, you'd have to throw the baby out with the bathwater with these approaches.

instead, i think harnessing the collective power of the forum community would be much more effective.

there's already an 'alert moderator' button. To make filtering of troublesome users more responsive, the moderation function could be changed or built upon to automatically disable a user's posting privileges once they've been flagged by a certain number of other users.

the system just has to be very easy to use (in the form of say, a tiny javascript action with no additional input needed), so that it's painless to help take the garbage out, so to speak.

Chiefly because I was not certain how much this was a technical issue and how much it was a policy issue.

I get this part. As a policy, we really don't try and interfere with the choices that members make when accessing FlyerTalk. We have and always will focus on the behavior of certain members rather than the broad reach of all members. At one time I did some research regarding an unruly member (well, former member) and left off at compiling a list of 230 different proxies and realized that it was a sieve for us to try and manage without doing harm for others. In conversations with other bulletin board operators over the years, I learned there were many remedies among boards on how to monitor these things including not accepting registration emails from anon addresses like yahoo and hotmail, etc. as they are often used to mask identities. As a result, most don't do anything more than what we do and that is to spend time among the community and with members identifying the abusers to our members and topics and address them one-on-one is terms of masking rather than try ot manage something that no one has a single solution for.

Randy, let me make one suggestion which might help. I want to make it clear, however, that I am not referring to the usual member who gets a suspension but only to those (like the one I referred to in the OP) who come onto FT and have a spate of highly objectionable posts in a very short period of time:

Remove all of their posts, not just the objectionable ones. These people enjoy seeing their prose on the internet and if they can not, there is less incentive for them to try again.

(The poster I referred to had, when I wrote the OP, 13 posts. I see that he now has 3 -- apparently all of the rest were in violation of the TOS. Those 3, too, should be removed even though they are not objectionable. If this becomes SOP for all such posters, they will have little reason to come here.)

I think in most cases we actually do as you suggest, though to be fair, our focus should always be on managing the tone and not the message. If this member can be taught )OK encouraged) that there are ways to post your thoughts and opinions on FT without resorting to antagonistic and taunting posts, then we've got ourselves a new member. The TS/S forum might be an exception right now as it is on a huge roll, accounting for nearly 20% of the posts made in our forums this past week. We're trying our best to manage this but yet not infringe in the opinions and posts of our members. Our focus tries to be on tone. I can't be sure, but i don't think the member you are referring to actually started out with posting by proxy, he/she started by posting from his/her normal ISP. Anyway, we'll continue to do what we can and perhaps this is something to look at but we have to balance against all rude members, regarding of where they post from.