Sock puppet
From Encyclopedia Dramatica
Multiple accounts are the natural result of a non-anonymous website. People switch accounts just to stay anonymous. But a sock puppet is when a person uses these accounts to prove they've not gotten laid for a very long time, if ever.
Anonymous websites let you samefag with little pissing away of your life and people can spot them with just a little bit of intelligence.
However, non-anonymous websites are MMORPGs where people work their sock accounts up to epic activity histories. Then when the sock puppets come by to back each other up, people look at their long histories of activity and go, "There's no way someone would spend that much of their time making all these accounts look like different people. They must be different people in real life because no one could have that less of a life spend that much time building these accounts up just to win some petty arguments."
And that, prey tell, is why sock puppets are effective. It's not that people can't tell, it's that they really don't want to believe.
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Liar liar
While always a part of the internet, Web 2.0 introduced wikis and self-moderation forums (e.g. YouTube, slashdot) where everyone already socked and you had to sock too or have all your contributions swept away.
Example:
- Niggerdick25: u r teh ghey!
- iHeartChode: am not!
- SockyOnSocks: r so!
- T3hS0ck: r 2!
- Niggerdick25: see, evre1 knows!
A sock puppet is a valuable tool in any flame war, where you can just endlessly parrot your own comments, driving away the opposition through sheer weight of words, until you are the last editor standing. There's nothing quite like being alone.
On LJ
A sock journal is an additional account on LiveJournal and similar sites, used to circumvent a ban_set, to allow semi-anonymous trolling, or to support the puppeteer in an argument.
Sock journals multiplied overnight on LiveJournal when the invite code system was removed, allowing anyone to make as many journals as they wanted. When used to troll or otherwise deflect responsibility, sock journals are no better than anonymous pussies, in fact, they're the same fucking thing.
On Wikis
Encyclopedia Dramatica has no more suck puppets than anywhere else. Sure like all websites whenever anyone gets banned on ED, they come right back. Sure, there was one guy hoarding socks of admin accounts on ED, but on TOW, oh it's such a different story.
On TOW, when someone socks, the entire userbase screams and soils their pants every time. The site's autistics spend endless hours there hunting down the socks, tagging them, and making pages stalking sock puppeters. While TOW has had some large sock dramas like Poetlister, the bar none best drama was from Gary Weiss.
Gary Weiss, with the support of SlimVirgin and Jayjg, turned Wikipedia into mouthpiece to sell books and advocate stock fraud. But this wasn't what made the drama good. What made it good was that with SlimVirgin and Jayjg's help, anyone who questioned him was permanently banned without appeal and branded a troll and a sockpuppet of WordBomb. This went on for five long years until Alison found out that all these socks were in fact the same person and the 300,000 people they banned along the way were completely innocent.
And people don't just gather editor accounts, but there's a large black market for farming and selling administrator accounts.
The "Over 200 Socks Club" is for when you are looking at the person's sock puppet category and gotta click to the next page to see them all. The legendary Willy on Wheels lead the pack with over 1,500 socks, but the administrators deleted all of them because he was a shameless attention whore. The current leaders are:
| Place | Sock master | Socks |
|---|---|---|
| First | MascotGuy | 1204 |
| Second | Runtshit | 1056 |
| Third | General Tojo | 867. |
| Fourth | JB196 | 528. |
| Fifth | Cplot | 452. |
Sock Farms
A sock farm is where someone creates a sock puppet account, and then another, and another, and another, and another... These accounts all make minor edits to articles aka "farming", and as many useless ones as they can to build up their edit count. They start having conversations with one another (for an example, see ContiE's talk page on Wikipedia). Then they fall in love, get married, break up, and fight.
Eventually this farm is "harvested" and it can get administrators elected, articles deleted, kept, merged, and through sheer numbers make anything happen on Wikipedia that they want.
Like a fine wine or whiskey, sockpuppets are best left to ripen and mature for considerable periods of time, until the checkuser history expires, so they can't root out the 5 other sockpuppets created from the same IP address because Wikipedia has deleted its logs by then. Yes, like good beer, sockpuppets are best in 'six-packs'. It is thought that the best course of action is to let the sockpuppets ripen like whiskey aging in a barrel, and by the time they are the age that Pedobear would approve most of for a member of the female sex, it's time to take them out for trolling.
Of course you need a lot of time before getting the fruits of your farming, but it's worth the efforts. Eventually you will manage to control over 9000 sock puppets, have yourself elected as Sysop, have everyone banned, and then organize a massive raid (maybe with /b/tards, but they are not your personal army) in order to vandalize and delete the whole encyclopedia. Wikimedia will collapse, Jimbo Wales will be fucked and you will be considered as a legendary hero, even greater than Willy on Wheels or Grawp.
Anyway, you are too lazy to do it, aren't you?
Experts
On Wikipedia there are those elite few, the Magic 23, that possess CheckUser abilities. This means that they check the IP addresses that any account edits from. While you're busy socking away there can be slip-ups: you might sign a post or edit a user page with the wrong account. Since this is Wikipedia after all, and suspicion is the order of the day there, this will be noticed. A CU will be notified and an IP check conducted: "ZOMG 34 accounts edited from ip 127.0.0.1." And you're fucked in the ass. But who wants that?
- Use Tor. Liberally. If you're caught just say you're editing from China and that the secret police would kill you if they knew you were editing Wikipedia.
- Use AOL. Yuck what internet veteran uses AOL you say? A smart one, AOL gives you a new IP with every page load. CheckUser=CheckUseless!
- Open Proxies This is risky as they are blocked on sight, and just editing from an open proxy can be seen as a sign of trollkind. Well, yeah.
- Use shared IPs like cybercafes and community colleges for some of your accounts.
- Get in your car and go searching for unsecured Wireless hotspots. This is great when using troll socks to post power words. Maybe you'll even get someone else banned!
- If you live in a city like Portland that offers wireless across town...well it can't get any easier than that.
Good sock hunting
Sock puppets are like shadows in Wikipedia, they are everywhere. Some, like Durova, devote not every free moment of their lives to ferreting them out, and yet for every ban-evading sock you terminate there will obviously be another one appearing tomorrow. It's a game you can play too! Jump into any deletion discussion or debate and try to pick them out. Which ones are alter egos of those active on the page, and which are returning exiles. Use your exceptionally well-honed linguistic analytic skills in a game that never ends. Please be warned that if you ever encounter a larger-than-usual indigo sock puppet, head for the hills, or anti-lulz will ensue.
If you find a sock puppet:
WHAT NOT TO DO
WHAT TO DO
- Blackmail them.
- Make fun of them by vandalizing their user page with your own puppet (lol irony) to announce it.
- Create a page on ED cataloging their catastrophic fail. (make sure you bring the lulz plz.)
- Just ban the fuckers
