The only sites i've been on where this is a problem are sites with hundreds of thousands or millions of accounts. I feel like it won't be an issue here , although admittedly with the focus on the zelda IP there are a smaller number of usernames which may be specifically desirable. I feel like its the type of problem which should be worried about after it happens rather than before though.
I've been on communities where socking was widely accepted and expected and a lot of people engaged in it. I can't speak to the reasoning of others, but I can speculate and I can express why I've engaged in it in the past.
1) Roleplaying - People might enjoy interacting with the community using a persona. They might make a funky kong account and then post on the community as if they were funky kong. They might want to continue using their regular account while they do this, or they might want to keep the actor behind the character hidden.
2) Fresh Start - People might enjoy re-engaging with the community under a new identity, and being given the opportunity to interact with the community in a setting where people don't already have impressions of them formed. As an example, someone in the MD section might want to engage in debates using a fresh identity to prevent others' impressions of them as a person from influencing their opinions on their arguments. Someone who is questioning their gender might want to try interacting with the community using a differently gendered identity to see what it is like. Similar motivations can exist in other social settings.
3) Expression - People might simply enjoy expressing themselves and exploring social settings using multiple identities or accounts. In the same way that someone might enjoy using certain words, or using a certain name or avatar, someone might enjoy using multiple accounts.
hi, ily rag
I feel like if a sock account is necessary for a roleplay to work out they can probably request and sort it out with staff to gain access to one limited at that section just like mafia players have already done. I don't see why a general rule should be changed, possibly affecting the entire site, when the intention behind it is roleplaying.
If the returning person has a clear record, fresh starts can also probably be sorted out with someone from the staff to avoid later misunderstandings. If the person is coming back from a long time break they probably don't even have to justify the same IP or anything, if anyone finds out and asks they can just say they lost their password or something. In this case I'm assuming the person won't be using two accounts around the same time, so I'm not even sure if I'd consider this a major reason to allow alts.
About the expression one, I feel like it might be unfortunate if some people can’t fully express themselves like they’d wish to but I’m sure there are probably other ways for them to do so since I can hardly see this as essential for a large group of members. Even so, not all kinds of expressions are allowed at will since some can disrupt the normality, and because of that I feel like many other important rules could end up be removed if we were to prioritize expressions over order which is probably not ideal here.
So, as I said, I don't think preventive rules should be removed, that feels like asking for ill-intended people to abuse it.
To name a few issues I can think right off the bat: use them to alternately spread the responsibility of warnings, and minor/major infractions, making these way less effective than they are; accounts created actively for flaming and trolling; 'cheating' on forum games, art competitions, giveaways, community related polls and awards, etc.
Not to mention the extra work of keeping track if all accounts have been behaving properly and having to fear them having a moe-esque breakdown and flooding the forum with all of them just for the sake of it.
I feel like some people mentioned here that the forum has already had issues with alt accounts before, and I feel like that's a practical proof that in at least this specific forum this might be a bad idea.
But, honestly, I kinda feel like the rules being there atm don't even do much and are there more to intimidate than anything. Which is not necessarily bad since they still prevent some cases from even starting, but I just feel like it could be enforced better. Are the new accounts' IPs constantly checked and matched to the active ones from the time they're created? If someone just downloaded a VPN or whatever cool kids use could they hid/modified their public IP, and would the staff be able to know? If someone is found out to be sharing the same IP as another account, how does one prove they're the same person?
I feel like anyone can just tiptoe here with an alt if they really want to, so I find it kinda weirdly amusing that people are so vehemently defending a rule that seems mostly for show at the moment.