Moved to ATMB from the Pit. And I dispute the premise of this thread.
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.
That would explain a lot
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. 
Can’t you tell? Der Trihs is really a sock of Bricker. Or was it the other way around?
We’re hoping to get up to 15 in the next couple of years.
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.
Well that certainly was a thread killer.
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?
Only if they log in to each account from a different location or ISP.
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.
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.
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.
Bots and human merchants of spam are not the same thing as sock puppets.
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.
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.”
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. 
What she said.
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.