Multiple accounts being used to dodge a question ban

Question

From what I've read on meta, multiple accounts by one user are "OK" as long as they aren't being used as "sock-puppets" to upvote eachother. Well I've come across someone who is registering multiple accounts to admittedly evade a question ban. This is a recent exchange I had with this person:

Dude, how many accounts do you have? I've seen at least 3, what's up with that? P.S. Might want to fix your question title.

Well the fact that they keep preventing me from asking questions so I had to create new yahoo accounts to get questions asked. Oops

I thought about emailing the team, but since I personally have fielded so many of this guy's extremely low-quality questions and he keeps coming back with more, I don't mind making it public - hopefully it helps keep stuff like this from continuing to happen (if that's even possible), or perhaps we can discuss what can be done to prevent it.

This guy is not trying at all to mask the fact that he's dodging a ban, and has 7 accounts. I can imagine how easy it would be to do if one were just a little more discreet about it. The red flag (besides the exact same user name) is this so-called "KOW Manager" project that he's been working on forever, posting scores of petty syntax error questions and other low-value delete-fodder to Stack Overflow. Any answers posted by these accounts are worthless self-answers, like "I figured it out, I had the wrong file name".

Here are the accounts:

• https://stackoverflow.com/users/525566/jeff-davidson
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/1149665/jeff-davidson
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/1193355/jeff-davidson
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/1222243/jeff-davidson
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/1261565/jeff-davidson ***
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/468511/jeff-davidson ***
• https://stackoverflow.com/users/1244239/jeff-davidson

*** ^{No activity on this account (yet), so it might not be applicable (but probably is).}

So there are 3 things I want to ask:

1. Can these accounts please be merged, or whatever it takes to restore sanity?
2. Too late now, but was it right for me to address this here on MSO? There's no way this would have fit in a flag message, but should I have emailed the team directly instead?
3. Since it's apparently very easy to bypass the question ban, and from what I've read on MSO, IP bans just don't work (understandable): Can anything be done to prevent this kind of abuse from happening in the first place, or is it a total lost cause?

Answer 1

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I've merged all of the relevant accounts (this one is a totally different guy and location, unrelated) together and suspended them for a year (for actively and knowingly doing this). There were another 3 accounts I found by IP sharing as well, same treatment.

I've thrown this in our team chat, we'll take a look at how to block this sort of behavior better based on the data available, I'll try and update this if we can do something more.

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Note to others: please don't try and evade our bans, we will end up blocking your IP range and disable you accessing the sites at all. No, I'm not kidding, we block a not-so-insignificant portion of China for traffic abuse. The bans, nice messages, and our willingness to give second chances are there for a reason. We honestly do try and be nice about it...but if you threaten the quality of Stack Overflow we will react. If you continue to do so, we won't be so nice.