tommydski wrote:i think i'm missing the point of something here.
is the idea behind having more than one username to post responses to your own threads? wouldn't the IP address show it was the same person? or doesn't it work like that?
Well there's a good thing that can be done with it... user accounts like "Bono" for example, were/are hilarious. Somebody posting as a fake Bono wouldn't be as funny if it was done from their normal account. But the specialized "Bono" account was played very funnily. The same thing goes for an account like "twomanyhelicopters" or "mauling walter" which were used to parody myself and the Walter person. I assume those accounts to have been created by someone who regularly posts under some name or another.
Then there's guys like Angry_Dragon, Angriest_Dragon, and Christopher_Dragon, which is all the same Chris. The way I understand it, he created new accounts as he went through different phases of his life. He doesn't continue to post from Angry_Dragon anymore, he now posts from Christopher_Dragon. I am not an admin here, so I can't speak to the admin take on this sort of conduct, but I personally don't find it to be bad at all. I may be totally off-base with his motivations, and as I am not him, I can only guess. As far as what was up with MajorMiller, TheMajorMiller, TheeMajorMiller, etc etc, I don't know what his deal is.
Creating multiple accounts to respond to your own posts is neurotic at best, and is really pretty fucked up and creepy. Directly addressing one of your user accounts with another is downright lame. I think I may have done it once.
I created the account "i got this one" to use for being silly. If you look at the posts from that account, you will see what I was going for. It's a joke, and it should be pretty easy to pick up on that. I tried to make it really obvious. "i got this one" is a fake internet persona. It's a really, really stupid person who's a one trick pony, obsessed with a fictional battle between him and Steve, centered around a made-up mom (who is always referred to as "mom", never "my mom") and cheesy bread, which is typically pluralized improperly. It is hard to spell and punctuate so terribly, but it's fun. I find the posts from that account to be funny, as my intention was to shoot for pure, absurd silliness.
I created the account "scott" because I wanted to A) post under my real name instead of an internet handle, and B) have the toomanyhelicopters account not be the first one to pass 5000 posts. But because of the recent thread about the 5000 posts, I gave up on that idea and returned to using the toomanyhelicopters account. Right now I'm unclear on which account I should use, and have asked if the two could be combined into one, which unfortunately they cannot. I'm probably gonna just use the toomanyhelicopters account and stop using this one. For the record, in case anybody missed it (and it's never been hidden or any kind of secret) toomanyhelicopters = scott. My real name is Scott. I've used the name toomanyhelicopters as an internet alias for years, and figure there's no point in stopping now. So the "scott" account will probably not be used anymore.
Russ, or any other administrator, should be able to tell (by IP address) which accounts post from the same place, and are *likely* to be the same person. There are of course examples where this doesn't work, like TheSwede and Vince Clortho, who I don't doubt for one second are actually two different people working at the same company (and thus appearing from the same IP address). If my roommate ever posted here (I assume he hasn't), his IP and mine would be the same. So the IP link only tells an admin so much.
Hope that clarifies something.
I wonder if Russ knows who Walter Malling actually is. I wonder if Walter Malling shares an IP address with some other "normal" forum poster. The world may never know.
