LogFAQs > #907136801

While we're taking a quick break, I have some unfortunate business to take care of. First, the conclusion: StifledSilence and Great_Paul are banned for the duration of SMFFFCXX. Stifled's ban is for repeatedly violating the "no alts" rule, while Paul's ban is for violation of the stipulation against the lending of accounts (in this case, the account Great_Ball).

It's very difficult to prove someone is alt voting these days - it's very easy to simply claim that you texted them, sent them a DM on their messaging client of choice, or even shouted across the house. It would be simple to prove if usermap information were public, but in absence of that, the best way is to find ample evidence.

1. If you paid enough attention to the first eleven rounds of this contest, you may have noticed that a few users always seemed to manage to save around the same time. Obviously, this isn't proof in and of itself, as we've had many siblings and married couples participate over the years. But when one user always saves within the same time frame of another round after round, it becomes more and more suspicious. Whenever Great_Ball saved, there was almost always a Stifled save about a minute away from it. Generally, when this pattern deviated, it was when it was late enough in the round that they would only get one save each.

2. For most of this contest, I've been using RNG to decide exactly when to put it up. Yesterday, though, I specifically made sure to post the round about an hour after Great_Paul saved in BetrayedTangy's Save My Father Figure. At about 3:30 PM ET yesterday, Great_Paul had been online about 45 minutes earlier and Stifled about 2 hours earlier.
Great_Ball's last visit, meanwhile, was at 12:42 PM ET the day prior - which just so happened to be the time of Great_Ball's last save in SMFFFC.
I proceeded to post the round, at which point Stifled received the Discord ping. His timestamp updated at 4:37 PM ET, shortly followed by Great_Ball's timestamp updating at 4:39PM ET - the time Great_Ball saved in yesterday's SMFFFC round. That timestamp has not updated since.

3. In the two weeks since the start of SMFFFC, Great_Ball has not posted anywhere except SMFFFC topics. Great_Paul has posted in many other topics, even topics that were running simultaneously, but has not used Great_Ball to post in any non-SMFFFC topics a single time in the past two months.

4. I dug deep into the archives and failed to find a single Great_Ball post not accompanied by a StifledSilence post. Every single Great_Ball post I was able to find was in some sort of contest, usually a Save My, and always paired with a Stifled post. The odds of this happening on a consistent basis over such a long time period are extremely low if there's no direct connection beyond what is allowed.
The best illustration of this I've found is their votes during the CXIX finals.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/377636630426812420/480460030663983104/unknown.png
Exactly six votes apiece, all within minutes of each other, even despite a gap of nearly 40 hours between the first two sets - textbook signs of one person on two accounts.

I hate that I have to do this now, this early into the contest and my tenure as host. But even more than that, I hate that this blatant and continued disregard for the rules has been allowed to go on unchecked for so long. This is not to say that others were derelict in their duties - I shared my suspicions with Leon last year, but there wasn't nearly enough proof to do anything back then, which is no longer the case..
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thelefty for analysis crew 2008 imo -transience
I have a third degree burn in flame-o-nomics -Sir Chris