It has come to our attention that some Foldit players are creating multiple accounts and using them competitively in puzzles. To clarify, each player should have only one competitive account. Multiple accounts that are used for chatting are okay. We will soon begin taking action to prevent cloned accounts from competing.
EDIT: This is the result of the recent community chat discussion about clones (http://fold.it/portal/node/989454).
Good, there are certain people that are blatantly cloning and they are just making it more difficult for me to gain a rank…
I only want to know the real name of the individual creating this thread, his/her position within the fold.it organization and a full financial disclosure statement indicating names and addresses of supporting organizations or governments. It seems odd that no one authored this thread, and it even looks like it might be just a bit threatening in nature. I want those disclosures made to me before any action is taken by Fold.it. I have a very strong feeling that many supporting organizations and government entities will find fault in this type of effort to intimidate.
On a personal level I only feel shame for those more worried about rankings then about curing sickness and furthering scientific knowledge.
Besides knowing we are helping advance science, points earned and higher rank are our rewards for playing the game well. When certain people compete with more than one account and crowd out the upper ranks, it discourages other players from playing. I think such oppression would be much more interesting to any concerned 'supporting organizations and government entities'.
I, for one, don't find this thread the least bit threatening, but maybe that is because I don't have ~6 competing clone accounts.
Thanks Hanto for sharing your desires and feelings. Everybody is entitled to an opinion. But the proposed rule changes are a good idea. The score-skewing effect created by account cloning creates a real discincentive for other players.
In any event, the fold.it organization is free to set their own rules without having to account to you or any of the participants in this game.
I have only 4 accounts of which only two are used at any one time, one reflecting one core on my AMD platform and one reflecting one core on my Intel platform. However at least two extra Hanto_???? accounts were created by someone as a prop to invade Go Science with. I have suspicions of who that was, but I'm sure that the Admin folks here could verify it wasn't me.
The only thing you guys are trying to do is intimidate especially since a numerically much weaker team is giving you a much tougher row to hoe.
If you have not that much accounts the ips will show this for sure so i don't get it why you complain about this thing…
I also think for everyone one account is enough for competion and if multiaccounts aren't allowed for chatting the method of chatting must get redesigned within fold.it
Right, clones were discussed at the recent developer chat, and the disruption to the ranking caused by them. Through the discussion with the community we decided that multiple cloned accounts should not be competing. This post is meant to clarify the position we are taking on cloned accounts.
From a purely technical point, how exactly will you determine cloned accounts?
Can't use email .. every account already has it's own email.
Can't use IP address ..
Where I live, there are 4 people, plus two neighbors using a shared wireless network, on 5 PCs. Two or more people could share each PC.
They ALL appear to the outside world as being one IP address. It's the nature of modern networking.
Where I work, at a large educational entity, there are between 8000 and 10,000 PCs that all connect to the internet, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them looks like it has the same IP address to the outside world. PC labs could have an entire class sharing random PCs - using internal IDs from the PC won't work either.
Banning an IP address could shut off an entire class of biology students who have been assigned here for homework.
(Well, there are a couple of classes from certain school districts who SHOULD be banned, and BTW, all those obnoxious students had the same IP address. I keep logs too.)
So, without having to provide a passport or SSN or some other personal identifier to compete, how do you propose to control this?
BOINC went through this same exercise years ago, and gave it up as impossible to police.
Banning similar sounding named accounts might work in the short term, but if people want to do it bad enough, they will find other ways. Anonymous proxies are always good.
And in the end, you create chaos, hate, (more) animosity between teams, and it will all be wated effort that could be used elsewhere on a project that certainly can use all the resources it can get.
Just thinking out loud…
In this feedback, there is discussion on WHY duplicate accounts are needed. http://fold.it/portal/node/989405
Until the Restore Absolute Best is fixed, it's impossible to explore more than one solution to the same puzzle without doing manual saves every couple of seconds, and that quickly become impossible to maintain. All it takes is one recipe doing a "Restore Best" and hours or days of work can get overwritten by the high score from another path.
I hear the developers complaining about not enough exploring, and now they want to inhibit it further? Doesn't make sense.