Alternate accounts have been an issue for a long time. Our wiki has over 1500 active users per month, and keeping an eye on all of them is really hard. During the “Summer of Steven” event, this number and activity on the Steven Universe Wiki will only increase, which will definitely bring more spam and vandalism.
The chat rules (as well as the general Regulations) clearly state that creating alternate accounts is not allowed on this wiki, but ban evasion in order to vandalize articles, spam, and disrupt the site in general has already become a common reason for blocks. Our block log is filled with blocks given for sockpuppetry and people get IP blocked every day.
In fact, there has been a particular user who has been sockpuppeting the chat for several years. This user has been using the same IP range mostly for several accounts of his which could be easily recognizable by the use of CheckUser (confirmed by a local CheckUser on another wiki where he happened to sockpuppet there too). He has used over 50 accounts to evade blocks.
Unfortunately, a lot of the users suspected of being a sockpuppet are banned instinctively, which is not the best way to deal with them, especially when there is the CheckUser tool that never lies. There was a case where a user claimed to be a sockpuppet of another user, for example. We can’t allow false evidences to be a block reason.
This is why we want Andrey and Lenhi to be granted with the CU tool that allows a user with the appropriate user right (commonly known as the checkuser right) to glance at the IP(s) a username has been connecting from. They will be using it in order to keep this wikia clean and peaceful. CU is a very powerful extension, but there is no way they will be using it against any of the users. And if you think they could, Wikia can watch the CU logs, so anything against ToU will be suppressed, and a person abusing CU blocked. Since a lot of the sockpuppeting takes places in the chatroom, we can make good use of the chatconnect log.
Summary
We would like to have access to the CU tool to prevent users using alternate accounts to bypass bans/blocks, something so frequent on the Steven Universe Wikia, which has become a common issue. We hope that our request passes for the reasons stated above (or below by the users).
Please use {{Support}} or {{Oppose}} to vote on this and explain your reasoning.
Use {{Comment}} if you want to share your opinion without making an actual decision.
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