PE - on the other hand you're a 'bugger-all' donator so maybe this could be your chance to give a little ...... see how it feels :-)
OK, PE for Mod .... vote now for PE, come commit a crime here . .. no, not Crimea, that was a different rigged election !!

Here's an idea of what is required from my perspective:

I generally keep the mod email open all day at work, which is usually about eight or nine hours. I try to check in once or twice per night and a few times each day on Saturday or Sunday, but jmo kindly gave me weekends off and picked up that shift, which was really nice of him.

I'd like to see another mod other than myself and jmo who is consistently online, although that's hardly a dealbreaker (see also: Zultar). We really don't want any wishy-washy players who may log in once or twice a week. You really need to be invested in the site. Please note that it does not mean you need to be an active forum poster or even an active gamer, I would just prefer to see someone who is online as much as I am.

Knowing the game backwards and forwards goes without saying. You should easily be able to spot cheating in a gunboat game. You should know what constitutes metagaming. You should at the very least know that you can't have more than one account. You should know that you have to mute any of blankflag's multis. And so on.

Its actually a pretty rewarding job, believe it or not. If you really love Diplomacy, then its the job for you.

I am wondering whether any algorithm can be devised to find out the multis. That would lessen up the work of the game mods :)
Any thoughts upon this?

That implies that finding multis is difficult, Balrog. Its the easiest part of the job :)

Eh, it would be a pretty big task, as many factors need to be taken into account such as join date, IP address, frequency of games played with certain players, 'suspicious moves', correlation of play styles with certain players etc. And then there's the risk that the algorithm might mistake a real player for a multi. Of course, it would be a great tool though and really help out the mods,it would be somthing like the algorithm provides a suspicious list and the mods give the final word.

Unless it's sandgoose, 2WL. He was able to successfully conceal his multis for a loooong time.

@ILN, not true, he was caught 4 different times and banned. Sandgoose was his 4th of 5th account on the site. He wasn't good at hiding, he was just persistent and good at convincing mods to give him another shot.

Personally, I'd rather not have that complicated algorithm just for the risk of false positives. And like I said, its not difficult to find multis. jmo did find Sarg, don't forget.

Most of them are pretty obvious, and for the ones that aren't, can't you just compare IPs and take an interrogative approach from there?

It was his TWIN BROTHER!

It was actually his split personality. He was manic depressive and often went into fugue states where he would create multi accounts.

And then sometimes even chat in the same chatwindow. It was all terribly confusing.

Lol, I know there's some kind of process when someone lies, but you can tell when someone lies by their games and by their access data...

Stop this charade of asking for candidates and give me the damn keys to the kingdom already. This tom foolery has gone far enough!!

^I endorse Krellin.

He will bring balance to the force.

"can't you just compare IPs"

I can have many different IPs. If I keep it straight, I have one when I am at Starbucks on my phone or tablet. One for my phone over my cell provider. One at home, one at work, one for my tablet on my cell provider... you get the idea. And all of these would essentially be unique. My phone is not my tablet so if I only ever did one multi on my tablet and always over the cell, one on my phone over the cell, one on my work system, one on my home system, and was careful with only using my laptop at Starbucks for the 5th, I could keep 5 distinct accounts that would never cross IPs.

@ 2WL : I presumed that it would be a hard task.
But as ILN pointed out in his reply to me, the algorithm might prove to be an aid to the game mods and save some of their time.

Heuristics aren't so easy to write. The tool you are discussing would probably take longer to write than the time it saves in tracking down multis.

The mod job would be a lot easier if people would stop being assholes. That's probably too much to ask, though.

@Draug: True that :)

@JimTheGrey: this community allows all holes as long as you warn for porn when starting a new thread.

Or did that rule change already?

No porn.

Oh. I'm not wrong that it was allowed for a short while if explicitly said so, right?

Actually, I think forum asshole doesn't affect the game mods much, if any. Abgemacht is the only one has to deal with that and he is so Zen that he could teach a lama a thing or two about inner peace.

It wasnt disallowed until a few months ago.

Actually, steephie, it was never allowed and got carried too far (by myself included). The mods handle this from work quite often and having to visit risky links could put their jobs in jeopardy.

But it was never allowed in the sense that it had official approval, was it abge?

@Draug, that's what Sarg thought too :) What people don't realize is we have more advanced methods of finding multis. For example, we hire elite Ninja's who randomly visit members homes, find their devices and check if they have different log in's on different accounts.