# Why can't socks be easily detected? **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [June 20, 2013, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509 "2013-06-20T21:28:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2013, 6:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/61 "2013-07-03T18:45:43Z")
Moved to ATMB from the Pit. And I dispute the premise of this thread. ---
**Author:** ![Drunky\_Smurf](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/drunky_smurf/32/449_2.png) [@Drunky\_Smurf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Drunky_Smurf)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2013, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/62 "2013-07-03T19:03:57Z")
According to a conversation on another message board there are only about 10-12 real people on this board and the rest are socks of those 10-12 people. ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2013, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/63 "2013-07-03T19:43:07Z")
That would explain a lot ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2013, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/64 "2013-07-03T21:46:47Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Moved to ATMB from the Pit. And I dispute the premise of this thread. Out of curiosity, what is it that you’re disputing? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2013, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/65 "2013-07-03T21:58:18Z")
> [@VinylTurnip](#): > > Out of curiosity, what is it that you’re disputing? That socks can’t be easily detected. Sometimes it’s tricky and sometimes they make it easy. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![tonyfop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/85f322/32.png) [@tonyfop](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tonyfop)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2013, 1:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/66 "2013-07-04T01:17:54Z")
> [@Drunky\_Smurf](#): > > According to a conversation on another message board there are only about 10-12 real people on this board and the rest are socks of those 10-12 people. Can’t you tell? **Der Trihs** is really a sock of **Bricker**. Or was it the other way around? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2013, 1:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/67 "2013-07-04T01:30:32Z")
> [@Drunky\_Smurf](#): > > According to a conversation on another message board there are only about 10-12 real people on this board and the rest are socks of those 10-12 people. We’re hoping to get up to 15 in the next couple of years. > [@FXMastermind](#): > > Well, in that case blocking entire countries is going to be beast for the board, in terms of stopping the above mentioned malicious traffic. Sure nobody in those countries can read, register or post. But who cares? There are some countries where we don’t have many readers (or any). Sometimes when we ban a spammer’s IP we find out we’ve inadvertently banned a reader or poster, and when that happens we change the ban to let the person back in. ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2013, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/68 "2013-07-04T15:00:40Z")
[Socks is dead](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socks_%28cat%29). ☹ ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/69 "2013-07-24T18:25:47Z")
Well that certainly was a thread killer. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Girlundone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/919ad9/32.png) [@Girlundone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Girlundone)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/70 "2013-07-24T18:59:16Z")
If a poster has Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the primary personality and any number of addicitonal personalities have all created accounts, then that’s not a sock situation, right? ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/71 "2013-07-24T19:25:32Z")
Only if they log in to each account from a different location or ISP. ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/72 "2013-07-24T19:29:07Z")
Speaking from experience, if you can actually change your posting style, and keep from doing whatever obsessive thing you were doing that annoyed the Mods and your fellow posters, you can create an account and rejoin a forum that burned you at the stake then tied you to a rail and ran you out of town. Just be sure you log in from a different town. And stop doing whatever it was that got you banned. Of course, if you have that much intelligence, will power and ability, you probably could have avoided being banned in the first place. But strictly speaking, a sock puppet is used to carry on a conversation with yourself, not to sneak back in with. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/73 "2013-07-24T20:13:07Z")
> [@FXMastermind](#): > > Of course, if you have that much intelligence, will power and ability, you probably could have avoided being banned in the first place. That’s the thing. People are generally banned from here only after multiple warnings and being given ample opportunity to change their behavior. So frequently, if a bannee returns, he picks up right where he left off and is readily detected. ---
**Author:** ![Morgenstern](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Morgenstern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morgenstern)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2013, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/74 "2013-07-24T20:53:37Z")
> [@elmwood](#): > > Airtel and Reliance are major headaches on my site, too. Say “Airtel Broadband” to any message board operator in the US, and the response will often be a shrug and a sigh, followed by a long rant. > > Most spammers from India are human “link builders”, and they have obvious tells. For example, many will enter the (often misspelled) name of an iconic city in the US, or just “usa” alone, as their location; or use the name of a Bollywood actor or actress for their username. Many are often not yet in the Stop Forum Spam database, so they’re not blocked when they try to register. I have a plugin that bumps new members from certain spam-prone countries into a mod queue. (China, Vietnam, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus are outright blocked, since the ratio of spammer/hacker traffic to legitimate users is outrageously high.) When I check the queue, I’ll Google “[username] vbulletin” or [email prefix] vbulletin", and if there’s a bunch of hits, I delete the account. > > It’s not just India. The ratio of human spammers to legitimate users is quite high from all subcontinental countries , Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka included. With an attitude like that I’ll bet you never get your free _Samsung Galaxie S4_ from the nice people registering with user names like FreeGalaxieS4. ---
**Author:** ![FXMastermind](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fxmastermind/32/7289_2.png) [@FXMastermind](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FXMastermind)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 1:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/75 "2013-07-25T01:37:38Z")
Bots and human merchants of spam are not the same thing as sock puppets. ---
**Author:** ![Seanette](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/seanette/32/9139_2.png) [@Seanette](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Seanette)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/76 "2013-07-25T01:55:32Z")
Bear’s Law™: They (hangers) are transmuted matter comprised of the socks you lose when you come home from the laundromat with an odd number, having taken only pairs to said establishment. In the presence of certain catalysts which occur in detergent, the unstable leftsock/anti-leftsock pair interacts, resulting in the decay of one of the component socks into hanger emission. When hanger emission is slowed by a closet chamber of adequate density and thickness, it is transformed into a wire hanger. This process can take place over large distances, and the hangers in your closet were not necessarily generated by your own socks. Author Sandra Felton postulates an intermediate larval stage in the form of paper clips. ---
**Author:** ![TubaDiva](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tubadiva/32/507_2.png) [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 2:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/77 "2013-07-25T14:43:55Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > Also, there are plenty of legitimate dopers who may share the same IP address for other reasons, like living together or working at the same place. Once upon a time he had a lot more faith in IP addresses as the sole arbiter in finding duplicate screen names held by one person; in our earliest days if there were two people posting from the same IP address it was a dead bang certainty they were at least in proximity, in the same house, the same office, etc. So we relied on that fact and made a lot of our rulings about socks based on it. I once banned an entire company – a multinational company with offices not just around the U.S.ofA. but around the world – turned out the company fed all its traffic through their main server and every user on their system worldwide had the same IP number. I thought I was banning a spammer and I banned big. In one of the stranger episodes, I got into a heated argument with someone who worked at Microsoft, who pointed out to me that he worked in a secure lab and didn’t share his computer or his space with anyone and certainly was not socking … turned out he had a colleague down the hall in another secure lab … but the same IP. Both Dopers. They did not know one another, Redmond was a big place even then. We were all surprised to find out they had the same IP number. Other boards take a wider approach because they have decided that certain regions of the world are just spammers, or don’t have enough non-spammer traffic to make allowing those domains access to their boards worthwihle. I’ve heard of administrators that have banned entire countries … I know one administrator that banned an entire continent. Today it’s a more nuanced approach. We look at IPs, yes we do, but they are part of the bigger picture. We look at everything about posters, including what they say and how they say it. I think mostly we get this right and for the right reasons. Can we be fooled? Sure, there’s probably multiple screen name holders typing away as I write this. I suspect the majority do get caught out eventually, simply because as the philosopher John Prine put it, “You are who you are and you ain’t what you ain’t.” ---
**Author:** ![TubaDiva](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tubadiva/32/507_2.png) [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/78 "2013-07-25T14:47:05Z")
> [@Girlundone](#): > > If a poster has Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the primary personality and any number of addicitonal personalities have all created accounts, then that’s not a sock situation, right? We actually did have someone ask this once – he claimed to have multiple personalities and said he was entitled to have multiple screen names based on that claim. We did not agree. He was ill, there was no doubt about it. I do recall at least one bipolar telling us they were entitled to have two screen names. They were a little unclear on the concept. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![TubaDiva](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tubadiva/32/507_2.png) [@TubaDiva](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TubaDiva)\ **Post date:** [July 25, 2013, 2:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/79 "2013-07-25T14:47:44Z")
> [@Seanette](#): > > Bear’s Law™: > > They (hangers) are transmuted matter comprised of the socks you lose > when you come home from the laundromat with an odd number, having > taken only pairs to said establishment. > > In the presence of certain catalysts which occur in detergent, the > unstable leftsock/anti-leftsock pair interacts, resulting in the decay > of one of the component socks into hanger emission. When hanger > emission is slowed by a closet chamber of adequate density and > thickness, it is transformed into a wire hanger. > > This process can take place over large distances, and the hangers in > your closet were not necessarily generated by your own socks. > > Author Sandra Felton postulates an intermediate larval stage in the form of paper clips. What she said. ---
**Author:** ![historicprops](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8c91f0/32.png) [@historicprops](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/historicprops)\ **Post date:** [August 11, 2013, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509/80 "2013-08-11T16:52:48Z")
> [@Zakalwe](#): > > You guys are all wrong. Socks go missing because, like preying mantises, socks become cannibalistic during the breeding season. That’s why the top part of the sock gets all stretched out. It’s from eating the mate sock. > > The tiny baby socks escape through the dryer vent (like ballooning spiders) and go elsewhere. This explains why you often find a sock that not only has no mate, but that you don’t even remember buying. > > I keep telling NatGeo that a primetime series (Sock Week!!!) on the lifecycle of the sock would be a HUGE hit for them, but they never listen (and in fact have started returning my letters unopened). “Scientists” my ass. Zakalwe, while your theory is interesting, I think the primary explanation is somewhat simpler: Washing machines and dryers are machines, with many spinning parts. if a sock somehow manages to find its way out of the ‘drum’ all it needs is to snag on one of those parts to become completely unraveled. After a certain point, all those sock yarns are going to become tangled together. However, since the tangling is the result of a consistent, repetitive pattern, the yarns are actuallY WOVEN together, until they have formed a really ugly towel, which then dislodges and works its way back into the drum. Occasionally, smaller amounts of yarn will be tangled/woven into unrecognized socks. This is the main reason socks disappear, and ahy every household hs at least one hideous towel that nobody in their right mind would actually pay money for. The whole mating/consumption thing only happens at certain times of year, and can’t account for all sock disappearances. Also, some of the higher-tech machines, which feature more complex agitation patterns and heat controls, actually generated temporal distortion fields, which will transport random socks to a roadside somewhere in Arkansas. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-cant-socks-be-easily-detected/661509.md?page=5)