User blog:McJeff/The sockpuppeteer chronicles

Because there have been two fairly big incidents of sockpuppetry in the last couple weeks and we've got people wondering WTF is the deal, I'm going to tell all y'all kids the stories of the Bully Wiki sockpuppeteers.

At0micb0mb is actually sort of unusual. He never really engaged in malicious editing with Bullyrocks!, and I haven't a clue as to why he would make two troll accounts (Hal and G4me4aster) and then use them to troll himself. Unlike some others he probably would've never gotten caught if Charitwo hadn't run the checkuser, although once he was caught it was fairly obvious that it was him. In other words the signs were there but we had no reason to look for them.

KOA is your standard-issue sockpuppeteer. Used a second account to get around being blocked and back up his first in arguments. If I'd actually noticed that Shadowking account earlier this all probably would have gone down when I did.

As for Bully Wiki's...

We only had one guy who sockpuppeted like those two. A guy named Wikiwikiwikiwikioldschool edited, but never did anything useful, he just posted stupid comments on talk pages and occasionally tried to stir up drama. After he got blocked, he created a sock named Pinkylover who he claimed was his younger brother. "They" have both left wikia for good apparently - they had some "Video game ideas wiki" that they used to spam about on Dan's and my talk pages, and there haven't been any edits to it since 2009.

Then there were the vandals who made accounts.

"GirlLoverVandal" still amuses me to this day. His MO was that he edited almost exclusively the articles about the girls. Mandy, Lola, Pinky, etc. His edits weren't even traditional vandalism - he would fix grammar and rewrite things. But he also liked to remove things from the article for reasons beknownst only to him. For example he was determined that Lola's article would not mention that Norton called her a tramp, or that Mandy's wouldn't say that she didn't know what a "bombshell" was. Even that isn't too bad, by itself, Dan and I've had a few disagreements about what should be mentioned in articles and even a really big fight over Pedro once. But he refused to discuss anything.

So we had to start blocking him. He edited from dynamic IPs making single blocks useless, so I had to teach myself how to perform rangeblocks. Once I did we had peace for many months, then he finally decided to start registering usernames. His usernames all had the same pattern as First Initial Last Name 3 Numbers. JSullivan735, CHenry444, etc... since he'd been editing for so long and I knew all his IP ranges, I re-blocked the ranges with account creation disabled. The amazing thing is that this guy is still active. Blocked for OVER A YEAR and when I took down one of the range blocks just to see what would happen, he edited again in 3 days.

So if anyone cares GirlLoverVandal is our most prolonged, prolific and determined vandal.

The "Birth Date Vandal" was some guy who kept adding fake birth dates to characters. Really, REALLY stupid ones - he had Petey born in 1994 and Bryce born in 1972 or something like that. He'd get reverted, his IPs blocked, and he went and registered several different usernames. Again, it took rangeblocks to put him to sleep.

The "Racist Vietnamese Guy Vandal" was someone who figured out he could troll Dan by adding "nigger" to any articles about black people. Thanks to him, all of Vietnam is rangeblocked and no one from Vietnam can edit Bully Wiki.

And then there's this one vandal on Wikipedia who I won't name because he's self-obsessed and searches for his username. I'm very good at seeing editing patterns that indicate sockpuppetry and so I sank a couple of his attempts to get articles deleted. He searched for my username and found Bully Wiki. The problem with him (and it's the same reason Wikipedia can't stop him) is that he edits from a /11 range. Wiki software only allows for blocks up to a /16 range. I had to place eleven /16 range blocks to cover the whole thing. I don't know for sure but I believe he was behind the TheDaddy series of vandal accounts. Nor do I care - from watching the guy on wikipedia, he's self-obsessed like I said, and loves to watch over his old blocked accounts. That's why none of them were added to the banned users list.