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  Is it OK to set up more than one account?

+ 3 like - 0 dislike
1463 views

My only answer on the site was down voted twice which now makes my reputation negative (damn! ;) ), which means I can no longer comment on stuff which requires a reputation of 0. I'm OK with this if that's the new rule since on physics stack exchange they require a 50 reputation to comment everywhere.

To get around this, I was thinking of setting up a new account and want to know if this is within the rules here?

asked Aug 3, 2014 in Support by physicsnewbie (-20 points) [ revision history ]
recategorized Aug 4, 2014 by dimension10

1 Answer

+ 1 like - 0 dislike

Yes, we allow you to post anonymously, so we should also allow you to make a pen-name character. This can be useful for allowing a person to discuss controversial things without impacting their reputation in general.

But please don't make a new account in this particular case, as this amount of downvoting is extremely small, and trivial to undo--- either delete your answer, or answer a few other questions to zero out the rep loss.

If you just make a new account, you still need to do these things to get the small amount of rep for priviliges.

answered Aug 5, 2014 by Ron Maimon (7,730 points) [ no revision ]

Are you suggesting to have two accounts, one for the reviews section and one for the Q&A section? I am not sure if I correctly understand this answer.

Certainly, the lack of a privilege should not be circumvented by sockpuppeting ...

(At present, there seems to be a bug concerning commenting the own posts when not fulfilling the permission, I have already pinged polarkernel about it)
 

I am saying that if Vladimir Kalitivianski decides to have two accounts, one of which is names "Vladimir Kalitvianski" and is devoted to discussing atomic form-factors, antenna physics, Newtonian physics, and so on, and a second sock-puppet account named "VK Renormalization Warrior" with negative rep, which only comments according to the negative reputation accrued to this manifestation, we should treat them as two different users for purposes of reputation accrual (not for voting).

Making a character and speaking in character is an established way to do controversial things in science. You can even make a "Bourbaki", where 6 people have the same username, and together get a lot of rep through their publications, which does not translate to any one individual.

I don't see the point of restricting such activity, as we can judge the contributions of each user, human, collective, or sock, individually, and give them priviledge according to their activity.

I don't think it can be abused, if these users are non-voting. It does require a "nonvoting user", however, so that people can't sockpuppet votes.

@RonMaimon I agree, besides, it should be obvious that sockpuppeting votes is not allowed, and there is polarkernel's vote reversal plugin to reverse a user's votes in the last few (can be set to anything) hours, which is to be used in case of sockpuppet voting.

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