sadams101 Posted October 21, 2021 Posted October 21, 2021 I have an issue where I had to ban someone and they keep coming back with new accounts. I've been able to block them via IP, however, during this process I've noticed that the device "use by other members" is not working as intended, or at all actually. The person keeps creating accounts and logging in using the same device: Quote Safari 14.1.2 on iPhone Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_7_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.1.2 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1 and each account shows this EXACTLY, however, when you click the "use by other members" tab it never shows the other accounts that use the exact same device.
Jim M Posted October 21, 2021 Posted October 21, 2021 18 minutes ago, sadams101 said: I have an issue where I had to ban someone and they keep coming back with new accounts. I've been able to block them via IP, however, during this process I've noticed that the device "use by other members" is not working as intended, or at all actually. The person keeps creating accounts and logging in using the same device: and each account shows this EXACTLY, however, when you click the "use by other members" tab it never shows the other accounts that use the exact same device. This is just a user agent string generated by the browser for all users who use that device/browser combination. The way we recognize a device is by a cookie. If the user deletes the cookie or uses a private browser that does this, we would not detect the same device.
sadams101 Posted October 21, 2021 Author Posted October 21, 2021 Well, then the code doesn't work as I would expect it to. You've already stored the device, so, in my opinion, this feature should simply detect other users who also use that device. Why? Because anyone who is doing malicious stuff will be blocking and/or deleting their cookies.
Jim M Posted October 21, 2021 Posted October 21, 2021 42 minutes ago, sadams101 said: Well, then the code doesn't work as I would expect it to. You've already stored the device, so, in my opinion, this feature should simply detect other users who also use that device. Why? Because anyone who is doing malicious stuff will be blocking and/or deleting their cookies. You're more than welcome to suggest this but the amount of users who will show up will be huge for even a small-medium sized community if there were a user agent list and would not fit the needs here either due to just sheer numbers. Every system to track a user is not without flaws. Typically, the most accurate are cookie or IP address based but those can be bypassed by those who know what they're doing. When dealing with troublesome members who are also tech savvy, the only way to thwart their attempts is going to be human eyes reviewing things. sadams101 1
sadams101 Posted October 21, 2021 Author Posted October 21, 2021 I was thinking more of also being able to add in some options, for example date ranges, it it would make no sense to just sort everyone by device. Options like a date range for when their account was created, last login, etc. That would be helpful, and you'd be surprised how different everyone's device is, especially given the different versions of software updates, etc.
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