I got the email below from BPL today. I can’t tell from the email if I’ve been identified as having a duplicate account or it’s just a generic email being sent to all members. Anyone else get this?
Since there was nothing specific about my alleged duplicate accounts (which don’t exist) I assume it’s just a generic email being sent to all.
Dear Backpacking Light Member,
The purpose of this email is to let you know that in the process of analyzing and cleaning up our databases as part of a major site speed optimization project, we have discovered widespread abuse by some users who are managing multiple accounts.
This practice has long been prohibited by Backpacking Light, and you can learn more about how we address it in our Website Policies and Terms, and our Forum Guidelines.
Some examples of the type of abuse we are seeing include:
Users maintaining one or more alias accounts as “troll” or accounts otherwise reserved for posting content that habitually violates our Forum Guidelines.
Users maintaining anonymous accounts for buying and selling in the Gear Swap, preventing other Gear Swap users from being able to research the posting history of the true author.
Representatives of commercial businesses (including owners, “ambassadors”, or other type of affiliation) who represent their company with a “real name” account and use an alias account for self-promotion of their businesses, or criticism of their competitors.
Our position on managing multiple accounts, and using alias identities, is simple:Don’t do it.
The practice is deceitful, creates distrust in our community, and allows users to hide their false (or perhaps worse, their true) persona behind the veil of anonymity.
We will be taking a number of actions over the course of the next week regarding users who maintain multiple accounts. Those actions will include one or more of the following:
Filtering all posts from these users into a moderation queue;
Blocking login access and posting privileges from these users.
We understand that some users may have multiple accounts for benign reasons. We won’t be distinguishing motivations in this policy. Multiple accounts per user are prohibited.Please conduct yourself in a way that builds meaningful relationships in the Backpacking Light community that are based on trust, not deceit.
Ryan Jordan, Publisher
Roger Caffin, Community Moderator
