Sock-Puppetting and the Current Affairs Forum

In terms of how long it took I would mention a couple of relevant factors:

1. As I indicated this has been going on predominantly since around March of last year. As has been well documented our powers (at Mod and Admin levels) were significantly less since the platform changeover in July. When someone does something like this you would expect some attempt to cover their tracks, but equally people may not go to so much trouble due to both passage of time, but also the fact the person in question probably realised we had less powerful tools. Just to add, since the changeover there has been significantly less activity at Admin level. That extends to myself as I have found both CA and Coronavirus forums have taken up a lot of my time.
2. As we say repeatedly, we do rely on reports and indeed in this case there were reports of some suspicious activity. That increased in the time leading up to my actions, and those reports provided additional information. In this case it was not the original account that triggered my own review. It was other accounts that I linked and only then saw that everything linked back to the McMurphy account. The fact I do moderate CA and in doing so I have access to the Admin tools we do have which probably put me in a unique position here allowing me to uncover the extent of the deception taking place.

On your 2nd point, the posts were being made from domestic and/or mobile IPs. I wanted to make clear there was no evidence of there being anyone else involved because there was no such evidence. When I posted all that detail I suspected there would be speculation that the party itself was possibly behind these actions and I wanted to avoid there being any suggestion this site had any evidence to this effect, or indeed was encouraging such speculation. Given there was no such evidence it was a point I was comfortable in making, but also pre-emptively sought to protect the site being dragged into a debate over possible involvement of the political party.

In terms of usernames I've never watched the film in question. Equally even if I had made such a connection I don't think the username itself is offensive in the same way someone taking the names of the likes of Hitler may be. We do have rules against offensive usernames, and these are set out in the site ToU:

6.1 Usernames

We would recommend you choose a pseudonym and do not use your real name (or a derivative of it) when joining boards.ie. You may not select or use a username that:

• contains "Boards" or otherwise misrepresents your relationship with boards.ie or any other party
• contains any profanity, is vulgar or offensive, or promotes an illegal activity
• violates any trademark or other proprietary right
• misleadingly impersonates someone else
• Occasionally users may speculate about the identity of anonymous or pseudonymous users. Such speculation is against our Terms of Use and we delete all such posts which are brought to our attention. However please be aware that we cannot guarantee that other users will not be able to determine your identity. There should be no expectation of complete anonymity anywhere on the internet.
• We reserve the rights to change usernames at our discretion. You cannot change your username after registration unless you become a subscriber.

Posters can report usernames violating these rules.

On the final point it is an exercise I would not suggest we follow. It would be time consuming, but equally is posters fell foul of forum or site rules the fact they were interacting with one particular individual is irrelevant. The rules are there for people to follow, and people should not speculate in open forums about this sort of thing. In this case people may well have been proven right, but that is not always the case (indeed I have seen reports of others being associated with this activity, but in those particular cases I am as comfortable as I can possibly be that there is no connection - someone posting such suspicions can end up unfairly creating suspicion of users going forward. Again though I would encourage posters to report such suspicions together with details of what triggered those suspicions and we will take a look

I don't think sock puppeting was that bad. Stopping it did though mainly rely on people reporting their suspicions. The example that triggered this thread was, by a country mile, the worst I have seen on this site

That's different from re-regs of banned (at forum or site levels) users, which Modutils was mainly used to identify

Now it may still be going on with others, but if it is I suspect someone has to spend a lot of time and effort to cover their tracks. As I've already indicated I think there were a number of stars aligned which allowed this one to get away with it so extensively