44
Vote this answer up if you think shared accounts are annoying and would discourage people from using them, but don't think there should be an official policy unconditionally prohibiting them.
30
There are no rules against having multiple accounts. Part of the reason may be because it is very difficult to police such accounts, unless they are detected via voting fraud. If you wish, you can merge any of your accounts.
Of course, if one of your accounts is suspended, using any of your other accounts is also forbidden. When this activity is detected, ...
29
... and closes her* post as off-topic.
This question is missing context or other details
assuming the name is real, which I doubt.
22
Moron changed his name. I don't know if it would be appropriate to give the new name; anyway it is not hard to figure out with the appropriate Google search.
21
Multiple accounts are usually tolerated, but they are not allowed to interact at all. If you are e.g. just using a different account to ask a question anonymously, this is allowed as long as you don't vote on it, don't circumvent any rate limit on it and don't interact with that account in any other way.
Interacting with your own accounts, and trying to ...
20
Currently, when a user is deleted for whatever reason, all of his votes are deleted as well. The reputation other users gained from his upvotes is removed upon deletion. If you lost 110 reputation due to this, it means the deleted user had voted e.g. on 11 of your answers, and those votes were retracted upon deletion.
Users are deleted for various reasons, ...
19
Vote this answer up if you think there should be an official policy prohibiting shared accounts.
19
However, what does not change are comments and answers by others in which you are referred to by your former name. So any time somebody else has addressed you as "user6312" you will still be "user6312" in that answer or comment.
This can cause some conversations to look strange. For instance, one of the top users on the site had the name "Moron" for ...
18
Often, these deletions are handled by a single moderator, or even by an SE staff member, and the circumstances are not published unless the person requesting deletion decides to make the issue public in chat or comments. This is simply to protect users' privacy.
You mention that SE encourages behaviors that offend good people. It would be easier to alter ...
18
As long as you don't use the other accounts to circumvent any limits or do anything you can't do with a single account, or use the accounts to create a misleading impression (e.g. by commenting on or answering your own posts), multiple accounts are tolerated. But they should never interact in any way.
In practice, it is very easy to accidentally misuse ...
18
Just marking your profile with "please delete me" is not enough, you also need to contact SE and ask for deletion. So maybe those users didn't do that. Or maybe they copied their profile to other sites, but only wanted to be deleted on one site.
User deletion is a process that has to be manually initiated by an SE employee.
16
From a sample of several of these accounts, they do all appear to be the same user, who has not registered an account and seems to clear their cookies between each visit to the site.
It would make sense to merge them. However, moderators can no longer merge users; it must be done either by the user themselves or the StackExchange team. Since there does not ...
15
As noted in the comments, you can find instructions for deleting your account here: https://math.stackexchange.com/help/user-deletion
Note that unlike some sites, we actually do hard-delete your account here - all of your posts are anonymized (they'll be attributed to "usernnnn"), your votes on others' posts nullified, your bio, preferences and such erased. ...
15
Looking at the UserId is a serious overestimate. The query
SELECT COUNT(Id) AS NumberOfUsers FROM Users
returns 82335, based on the data from October 13. (This includes both registered and unregistered accounts.)
Since September 1, new users are joining at the rate of about 180/day, see new users per day. If this continues, the user base will reach 100000 ...
14
Unlike with attribution, where you have to supply
the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other slight differences.
(copyright, license and ...
13
I challenge your assertion that "a great number of persons that have been created an account because they were motivated to learn and share mathematics".
My guess is that a large majority of the people who create accounts on MSE do so in order to get a couple of homework questions answered right before a deadline. They don't care about maintaining a ...
12
FWIW, there are many users on this site with 3 or more accounts tied to the same e-mail address. (The Data.SX browser searches these dupes using e-mail hashes, so the e-mails are not revealed.) When I first started as a moderator I wanted to do something about this. But for the most part these users are not particularly more likely to cause trouble (compared ...
12
From the top of my head:
Ilmari Karonen is the maintainer of SOUP that patches various glitches on SE-sites, some specific to this site. See the user page for details.
robjohn has developed a tool, known under the name CatChase ChatJax, so that math renders in chat. As far as I know it is widely used, and makes chat a lot more useful for some. See a meta ...
11
It appears that another user has been removed, cancelling the upvotes the user has issued, thus negating the reputation they had given you. I too lost reputation today for that reason.
11
As a relatively new user of this site, I would say that I would find it confusing and unhelpful if people were to have "multiple personalities". I would be constantly thinking about whether two people were actually the same person. I can't really think of any reason why having two accounts would be of benefit, apart from artificial inflation of reputation.
11
After the next deploy bin will no longer be subjected to the horror of being shunned by the man. Users named bin everywhere will be able to rejoice.
11
The numbers are assigned consecutively to all accounts created on the site. With one exception, they are positive integers. The first accounts are created by SE developers in the process of putting the site together. Geoff Dalgas is user number 2, and there is no user number 1 (I don't know why). The first "real" (non-SE-affiliated) user of Math.SE was Noah ...
10
It is allowed to have several accounts as long as you do nothing with those accounts that in essence you could not also do with a single one.
Some examples of things not to do:
Do not use a new account to evade a suspension or ban.
Do not vote for posts of your other accounts. Best, try not interact with posts of your other accounts at all.
Do not use ...
10
No, on a per user basis it's not a new record, not even close. See the point-timeline of Brian M. Scott around end of March this year for a recent loss an order of magnitude higher.
Yes, for 'large' accounts votes are often preserved. Actually the criterion are the votes cast, not the points of the user, considering both the absolute number as well as the ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
