You know, I’ve been wondering a while (and this is as good a thread as any to raise it): What’s the Dope policy if two people living in the same home - let’s say, a married couple who are both Dopers - are logging in under the same geographical location, using the same Internet, maybe even same computer?
Are they suspected of being 1 person under 2 names?
Your memory is faulty on that as well. Your posts were not moderated. In fact, no mod posted in that thread at all.
To your credit, you at least reported it. No one else did.
Your report just said “talks only about Scottish Independence.” Again, if you had more definite evidence, you should have reported it. If you want to be helpful, then be helpful. Mods can’t read every single post, and don’t just assume we’ve done so.
As I said, you can change your name but you can’t change who you are. We rely on many lines of evidence besides just IPs, which I am not going to go into here for obvious reasons.
We have a white list of posters who are known to share a computer or internet connection. If we see such activity between posters who don’t seem to have nefarious intent, we will generally ask them what the situation is.
I won’t say ‘hot nerds’ is an oxymoron, but it’s gotta be pretty close. 
And we’ve banned literally thousands of socks. Saying that we “don’t to jack” about socks is absurd. We’ll ban them if we can establish enough evidence. If you can help with that, great. But don’t complain that we’re not interested in catching and banning socks because a single report wasn’t acted on.
I just looked at a bunch of your posts. I’m pretty sure I could nail you within a hundred posts, even if you didn’t post on your usual political interests. 
Aisle 9. Since I work in the store, I get a 10% discount.
You’re right Annie. Those are your tells. I could identify your sock in well less than a hundred posts.
I usually spot mine by dripping food on them while I eat standing at the kitchen counter.
Caught a plagiarist before, but never a sock. When someone is repeating another person’s sentences word-for-word and badly fitting it into present context that can be easily recognizable. Ask anyone TAing a first year University course.
There are actually people who feel the need to plagiarize in order to take part in a conversation in a thread? That’s truly sad.
On Wikipedia, sock puppets investigations (SPIs) are all done on a page anyone can view. I don’t believe there are any “private” spaces on that site. There are places that restrict editing, but not reading. So everyone can see the results of an investigation.
But that’s tough for people doing the investigation. Because when I give my conclusions, I need to say why I arrived at my decision. How do I do that? If I say “this guy always uses single quotes” then he’ll skip doing that in the future. So I try to be vague saying something like, “there are distinctive communication patterns shared between known socks”.
It’s always a balance between how much info you disclose to justify your conclusions, or giving the person tips on how to evade detection. That’s why I think it’s good that moderators here have a “mod loop” where they can coordinate between each other without letting too much info out to the public. I wish I’d had that luxury. The best I could do is bounce emails off other admins.
I definitely remember posts where he was accused of being Terr. Admittedly, they were much more recent the other accusations, but I don’t think they were just the day before.
The thing for me is that mods [del]yell[/del]express extreme frustration at people for repeatedly incorrectly identifying socks or trolls (even to the point of making special GD/Election “guidelines” about it) so I don’t usually like to report my suspicions before I’ve brought it up to other posters first.
So that’s what I use the Pit thread for. It’s both a sanity check and so I have more people to back me up so it doesn’t look like I just have a personal beef with a poster. Heck, often I assume someone else will report because they are clearly more sure than I am. (Plus the mods clearly read that bread and react to it.) Perhaps that’s a bystander effect situation.
Ever since you voiced your frustration at me that one time, I’ve put barriers in front of reporting for myself, to discourage doing it too much. Until recently, for example, I only PM’d, adding an extra barrier, until Chronos told me he’d rather I report.
Point is, if you want more reported suspicions, I can do that. I just think there might be reasons people feel more comfortable posting their suspicions in the troll thread first beyond “showing off.”
You’re not thinking like a catfisher then. They wouldn’t use that term overtly.
“I think intelligence is sexy, tee hee!“
If you report suspicions, we might roll our eyes at you if you’re wrong. But we will investigate it. And sometimes, you just might be right.
It’s a lot easier to compare two people, than to compare everyone.
Is that a pocket protector or are you just happy to see me?
When a sock account is discovered, do they ban the original account as well as the sock account?