User blog:Mark Otaris/The story of a sockpuppet



A user named ScriptNHelper, also owning the account Wonged on ROBLOX, has attempted, in January 2014 and the nearby months, to enter the groups Master Scripter, Proficient scripter and Scripter's Guild on ROBLOX. In order to do so, he has plagiarized essays from blogs, submitted as examples of his code scripts coming from free models, and sent messages to group members to get answers to questions of entrance tests.

In August 2014, this user created the account Xermano on this wiki. After contributing some edits, he asked on Dronian's message wall whether he could get the rollback user right. Dronian replied that he needed more contributions to the wiki, and one day later (two days after registering his account), Xermano asked for the rollback and chat moderator rights on the forums. He created a new account, FuzzyDice, on September 3, and started editing with that account. He requested that the user rights he had asked for be given to his new account rather than the older, and so they were.

After contributing some more edits, this new user went on to request administrator rights. PeterPeter5000 posted the following warning on the thread:

"What feeds my big concern is a discussion I had with a user on Community Central about Xermano. This user I spoke with about Xermano told me '[He] lied that he spoke multiple languages to get user rights on Yatalu's Wiki Language Brigade'. According to a member of the WLB, Xermano had been using two or more Wikia accounts to bypass a block that was placed on his account after the brigade found out he was lying."

As it turns out, Xermano had at the same time, or perhaps earlier, starting in July, had problems on the English Wikipedia, where he was originally known as Akifumii. On that account, he had been involved in a sockpuppet investigation led by the zealous Hungarian speaker Borsoka who refused to believe that he too knew Hungarian, as he had apparently claimed. This investigation concluded that there was insufficient evidence that Akifumii was a sockpuppet of some other accounts.

A discussion was started on the incidents section of the Wikipedia administrator noticeboard about harassment of Akifumii, who had by then created a new account named Xermano, by Borsoka. After some discussion, it became clear that Xermano had attempted to accumulate user rights by deceiving administrators into granting them, and by lying about the languages he is able to speak.

In the end, Xermano was indefinitely blocked from the English Wikipedia and numerous users have expressed distrust regarding him. As the eternal sock puppeteer that he is, he evaded the block by creating a new account, Umafiy, which was later renamed to FuzzyDice, which was later renamed to Eurodyne. This account was blocked from the English Wikipedia as well, and Xermano moved to the Simple English Wiktionary to find other victims to convince to give him user rights.

There, he quickly got the rollback right from the bureaucrat who welcomed him, and even managed to become an administrator for some hours by bypassing the procedure. The change was reverted by a bureaucrat who asked him to submit a request for adminship. He did so, some days later, and the request was unsuccessful, the most cited reason being the issues on the English Wikipedia, which fortunately did not go unnoticed.

This blog post was, hopefully, the very instructive and entertaining story of a sock puppeteer. If there is any inaccuracy in this blog post, I invite you to tell me about it.