We've received a mail to the webmasters list asking to close a particular account.

The account holder apparently tries to impersonate another person, who uses the account name on another site.

Also, the "my Drupal Site" field points to the website of that other site.

However, the account doesn't use he actual name of the allegedly impersonated person (name field is empty).

We've never had such complaints before and we need to discuss how to deal with it.

Comments

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

I think we should do more or less what happened with the myEvents issue.

  • Not much - let the individuals involved deal with each other.
  • Be a conduit for information. Inform the person who is accused of impersonation that they are being sought out/watched.
  • Hope those two work well enough.
  • Last resort: wait for official orders - this person suggested they would get a court order and I think that's what we should wait for before taking one person's word over another.

My hope is that by simply informing everyone in the situation of what is going on that the impersonator will remove their account. But if not...I think it's only fair to get real authority before asking us to shut down a random account. Otherwise we could be put in a situation of blocking the real person and not the fake one instead of vice versa.

gerhard killesreiter’s picture

gerhard killesreiter commented

I wanted to contact the account holder but I found that the account creator used a throw-away mail address. These aren't allowed and I blocked the account. Remains to see what to do with the content.

kbahey’s picture

kbahey commented

Per email discussions on the webmasters list.

I think it should be unpublished, based on the fact that a) the author is probably trolling and used a proxy AND a disposable email and b) we got a complaint on the specific post.

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

Are we going to follow that precedent sitewide?

I don't think it's clear this is trolling.
I often use proxies on insecure wifi.
We often get complaints about posts.

Disposable e-mail address is a bit subjective. Given that most spammers on d.o use gmail, I'd say that's pretty questionable.

I see no reason to delete the content.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

If this is the thread I remember, I saw the discussion and did look at the user accounts.

The first user (claiming to be a treasurer or something) had the disposable email address. The second user had an email address from the domain in question. Based on that, there seems to be validity in the second user's complaint. (The post was about the first user getting access to user/1 account.)

As for what to do, this is probably best handled on a case-by-case basis.

And I don't think we should consider gmail, yahoo mail, msn mail 'disposable' - there are a lot of legitimate users that use them. (There's probably a few mail.ru users who are legitimate. qq.com, however...)

And bringing up this recent issue: #939636: Define clear guidelines for conflict resolution and banning users

gerhard killesreiter’s picture

gerhard killesreiter commented

The "disposable" address was from a service similar to mailinator.com.

tvn’s picture

tvn commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Closing old issues. Please re-open if necessary.