Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Multiple Account Detection & Prevention

It happens all of the time. Some members will make multiple accounts to back their own opinion or get an extra vote in a poll. Here's a modification that will detect and prevent multiple accounts, as well as notify the administration about multiple accounts. Inspiration for this modification came from the work of MPDev (creator of the Multiple Account Login Detector) and randominity (creator of the Multiple Account Registration Prevention). This is basically a combination of those two modifications but with new and improved functionality.

This is not an update to the "Multiple Account Login Detector (AE Detector)" nor is it an update to the "Multiple Account Registration Prevention." If you have either one of these (or both of them) installed, you should uninstall them before installing this modification.

With the initial release of Multiple Account Detection & Prevention, I believe that I have fixed previous bugs/complications as well as improved the efficiency and logic of the code. This is my first publicly released modification. I would appreciate any comments and suggestions!

Confirmed! This works perfectly on all vBulletin 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 versions.

Unfortunately, I cannot give support right now. I may be able to help periodically, but until my schedule yields some more free time, I won't be much support. Please check back in a week or two.

Basic Details
File Edits: None
Template Edits: None
New Files: 6
Hooks/Plugins: 3
Global Phrases: 36
Install Time: 2 Minutes or Less
Install Difficulty: None, Very Easy

Features and Settings
- Login Detection
- Registration Prevention (Multiple Methods)
- Ignore Child Accounts
- Ignored Users
- Ignored Usergroups
- Ignored ISPs
- Prevention Usergroup
- IP Address Based Prevention
- Extended IP Address Prevention
- IP Address Time Inclusion
- Banned Account Check
- Primary Banned Usergroup
- Cookie Expiration Time
- Cookie Refreshing
- Cookie Name
- Cookie Reset
- Multiple Account Reporter
- Reports via PM
- PM Report Recipients
- Reports via New Thread
- Forum for Report Threads
- Verbose Mode
- BB Codes: LIST, URL, CODE

How it Works
With every newly recognized login/registration, an account-counting cookie is set (or added onto) with the member's User ID. Depending on the settings, Multiple Account Detection & Prevention will analyze the cookie during login/registration to see if there are any multiple accounts.

Login Detection offers cookie-checking and reporting. Registration Prevention offers the same thing, plus more advanced features. First of all, when it prevents an account from registering, it actually moves the registrant to the Prevention Usergroup so that the administration can review the case. This also allows for customized privileges for recognized multiple registrants. Registration Prevention also has IP address detection which finds out just as much information about users. Depending on an administrator's preference, this modification can also reban a new registrant if one of their previous accounts has been banned. In fact, if the administration wishes, multiple registrants can simply be denied registration all together.

Whenever there is a detection/prevention, the modification will report the information to the administration through private messages, a new thread, or both (depending on settings). The Multiple Account Reporter can be any valid user.

Known Issues
- vB Optimise users: Reporting via thread seems to get messed up by vB Optimise, so try reporting via PM instead.
- PhotoPost vBGallery users: The registration handling appears to not work properly when PhotoPost vBGallery is enabled.

From what I can tell, these known clashes have been caused by the other modification's coding. The author of vB Optimise will not even work with me to fix it. Until they improve their coding, I'm not sure if I can do anything about these issues. As far as I know, administrators that do not use the above modifications will not have any problems.

Installation / Upgrade
Unzip the package (madp.zip), upload the files to your forum location, and import the product file (allow overwrite if upgrading). Please read the ReadMe.txt file that is packaged with the modification for more information.

Please remember to mark this modification as installed if you use it!
If you like it, nominate it for the Mod of the Month!

Thank you!

[mark370]

Could do with a bit of advice / help here if you can please.

If we have someone joinup and we delete there account [for not meeting our requirments] and that user signs back up with the same username [wether it be straght away or months after] the mod is flaging that user as a Multiple Account ?

Also i should point out that when searching for any members Ip in ACP the search results are showing Super Admin , Admins, mods and registered users all having the same ip as the user that was searched for, this doesnt happen on every search result its intermitent at the minute, ovbiously this is a error and needs to be addressed thing is ime not sure if its to do with this mod or not but weve only just noticed it happening so i dont how long it actualy been like this.

Any help with the above issues would be great.


Here is a Example:

Multiple login detected from "Username".

Other recognized logins for this user are:

[ :: Verbose Information :: ]

[ Cookie Information ]

Cookie Used: IDstack
Raw Data: ,"previous Id",
Clean Data: "previous Id"
[ Capture Information ]

Caught by: Cookie

[ Verbose Messages ]

- The number of recognized users is different from the amount of ID numbers found in the account-counting cookie.

[ Dev Information ]

Verbose Message Bitfields: 1

thanks Mark

[Kiros72]

Yes, I came across that issue (the first one) just recently as well. I think that it might be time for a small update to version 1.1.2.

The IP address issue might be caused by the user that you have set to post/send reports. That's also something that I was planning on fixing for 2.0.0, but since more than one improvement can be made in short order, I'll probably release version 1.1.2 sometime soon.

1.1.2 won't fix the past IP address matches, but it will keep it from happening again.

[mark370]

Originally Posted by Kiros72

Yes, I came across that issue (the first one) just recently as well. I think that it might be time for a small update to version 1.1.2.

The IP address issue might be caused by the user that you have set to post/send reports. That's also something that I was planning on fixing for 2.0.0, but since more than one improvement can be made in short order, I'll probably release version 1.1.2 sometime soon.

1.1.2 won't fix the past IP address matches, but it will keep it from happening again.

Funny you should say this as we have all the reporting coming from the S-Admin account which is also one of the accouts that is mainly showing up in the Ip search results problem

Question: Is there any sql cmds or something that we could do to clear/ reset all the ip's ready for the 1.1.2 fix so we can get the search back to normal again ?
because how it is at the minute its very hard to distinguish between members who have genuine accounts and who have multiple accounts as we could be repremanding members who are showing to have multiple accounts through ip search.

thanks for your help Mark

[BlueNinjaGo]

Perhaps disable the IP checking part of the mod until then? Rely on cookies? Not as effective, I know, but a temporary solution.

[Hornstar]

I don't think a simple sql command could fix that, but maybe kiros can come up with something because I too would like to restore my username showing up on all the multiple accounts.

[Kiros72]

Hmm. I think that this issue might be solved by deleting (physically removing) all of the reports that were sent by the reporter. I haven't yet tried this, so if someone is willing to, please let me know how it goes.

[MindStar]

You could use SQL to find all the posts made by the reporting account whose title matches the reporting message (wildcarded) and then change the IP address of those posts.

PHP Code:

SELECT * FROM `post` WHERE `userid` = 1 AND (`title` LIKE 'Multiple Registrant%' OR `title` LIKE 'Multiple Login%'); 


I suggest that IP address for reporting should be 0.0.0.0 to avoid confusion.

The following SQL query should reset the IP Address to 0.0.0.0 and assumes that the userid that you are using to make the reports is 1

PHP Code:

UPDATE `post` SET `ipaddress`='0.0.0.0' WHERE `userid` = 1 AND (`title` LIKE 'Multiple Registrant%' OR `title` LIKE 'Multiple Login%'); 


You could refine this further by selecting posts that were made in a particular forum.

[MindStar]

To fix the plugin so that it reports multiple logins or registrations from the same account from a NULL IP address ("0.0.0.0"), open detection.php and insert the following code at line 280

PHP Code:

$threaddm->do_set('ipaddress', "0.0.0.0"); 


before

PHP Code:

$threaddm->save();
unset($threaddm); 


[Kiros72]

Great thinking, MindStar. However, everyone please remember to use the actual User ID that you have the reporter set to if it's different than 1.

I'll be releasing version 1.1.2 with fixes to both the detection and registration soon.

[Kiros72]

Okay, the new version has been uploaded.

Thanks for your patience, everyone.