Please add a notification for new accounts from an existing IP address of a suspended user

Question

The title gets it mostly. On EE.SE we have recently given out a few suspensions and in almost every case they attempted to make a sock puppet and continue with their previous behavior.

If a flag had been raised for moderators of the existence of the account we could have been watching and prepared for the repeating behavior instead of reacting after many users were harassed again.

The basic process would be:

1. User X from IP A is suspended.
2. User Y from IP A is created during suspension of User X.
3. Flag Moderators of the presence of User Y with relation to user X.
4. Moderators monitor and have advantages if users continue unacceptable behavior/issues and use super secret moderator stuff.

A more broad tab notifying of coinciding users based on this alone might be interesting but is secondary to this.

Answer 1

I like this idea. I've only been at this a few days, but I've already had to deal with a couple users who've created multiple sock puppet accounts to work around either a suspension or the automated question-asking ban. It took a bunch of work to suss them out, and such a notification would have made it immediately obvious that these were new accounts by the same person attempting to work around a ban or suspension.

To counter Aaron's doubts about the problems of shared IP addresses, these would just be notifications or Community user flags, which are easy to glance at and dismiss if not relevant.

Also, I think the frequency of these notifications would be less than he anticipates. At a given moment, how many users are suspended or banned from asking questions? How many of those users are on shared IP addresses? On those shared IP addresses, how frequently are new accounts are being created? Somehow, I think we'll see fewer of these notifications than Community's "too many comments" or "multiple deletions in a short period of time" flags, and we deal with those just fine.

The time saved from not having to track down new accounts from these repeat offenders, not to mention the garbage questions, etc. that the community won't have to see, in my opinion would offset the minor inconvenience of having to dismiss false-positive flags.

Answer 2

We on WordPress Stack Exchange have a user whose 11th sock puppet I had to remove just two days ago. There are other users with up to four sock puppets but this one we have to watch very carefully – and manually. Daily.

It would really help to get a notification. Some users will never stop to open new accounts and our time should not be wasted on tasks so easily to automate. And the earlier we get the notification the faster we can delete their questions, preventing other users wasting their time with answers.