How to detect ALT Avatars?

Is there a script that can detect ALT Avatars? I've heard of something like that before...

I need it for a contest board, to prevent people from using more than one Account to vote for somebody. (I know some people using 2-3 ALTs to vote for themselves).
The script should check if there are some ALTs and then disqualify them.
Can anyone help?

There is no such thing in LSL.

You could require the voting to take place on a website

You have no way of telling who is at the keyboard typing this answer. Not here on the forum, not in second life, nor on most of the big public email providers (gmail, hotmail etc.). I can make as many ALT's I care, and supply each with their own email address etc. Hence, no way to do it using scripting, nor using web, or any other thing I have heard of.

So, today I am Boreal Latte, tomorrow Boreal Dardjeeling

Or you could try map IP addresses to agents by using a grid of 16x16 parcels and then use that temporary info to prevent alts that run on the same internet connection from voting again. This is a temporary quick workaround that should hold for most voting sessions and prevent most cases of people voting more than once. It takes me a long while and effort to reset my IP address for the value of trying to cheat by voting twice.

Even the parcel media isn't a surefire thing. Because if they have parcel media disabled they won't download any sort of "image, mp3, etc".. so you won't be able to crossreference. Likewise there's the issue of husbands and wives, whole families on SL from the same house.

at some point you just need to shrug and move on.

using a website to do it, is probably the best solution if it's REALLY THAT IMPORTANT.. but if you're just talking about some random "who is hottest in a wet t-shirt" contest.. then I wouldn't bother.

ok I see... well Thank you for your answers.

Using IP addresses to detect alts isn't foolproof. You may falsely identify a network behind a nat router as being ALT accounts. Corporations and Schools use nat routers.

The only way I can think of would be to declare all of the voting to happen at one time and, when the time comes, have the board count down 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, *click*. Any clicks received outside of a that 1 second window are ignored. The idea is that an alt user could not vote for themselves because they cannot switch between sessions fast enough to "catch" the click window.

However, this would probably lose a lot of legitimate votes due to sim lag, especially if it's being used in popular areas. Also, friends voting for friends is a far bigger problem than alts voting for alts, so it wouldn't really make the contest more accurate, either.

Eh. You can run multiple clients simultaneously, use a robot to do the clicking, set them up on multiple computers and use both hands and/or friends to click for you, etc. What's the point really? Yes, it is often possible for someone to stuff the ballot box so to speak on online surveys. It's pretty pointless to try to secure a system against it unless it is a pretty critical application, and then you're going to need a pretty involved registration process including RL information. Best just to assume people are going to be fairly honest, or that they will all operate at roughly the same level of dishonesty.

llFingerAltAccount().

Ask everyone participating to buy votes with Linden dollars by paying a vendor reperesenting each contestant. Make public the transaction history after the contest, and disburse the proceeds back to the voters as evenly as possible.

If someone wanted to game the system, they still could, but they would have to pay the other voters to do it.

Erm, they'd have to pay an amount proportional to the number of votes (alts), but they'd also get BACK an amount proportional to the number of votes (alts), since again there's no way to tell if they are different users or not. There wouldn't be any paying other voters for anything; it would just require temporarily lending money to vote. And requiring money to vote sounds like it's getting just a little too real-world to me.

One person could also buy L$100,000 worth of votes and vote for themselves using 100 Alts, or just one. The contest result would be the same, but obviously would get a little rediculous trying to gain BACK that proportional amount (assuming no one else voted with more than L$1000). If someone else did vote with a large amount of L$ they could do that with 1 or 100 of thier own Alts. The bottom line: Is it worth it to vote with more L$ or less alts, especially if the transaction history is made public? Somewhere a balance has to be made based on desire to win versus desire to remain anonymous. Running 100 Alts simultaniously and randomly (different payment amounts) is no easy task.

Anyways, I can see that any attempt to secure the voting eventually becomes so complex it is self defeating. It was fun speculating on solutions though .

Yeah, I have enough trouble with "multi-page" contest boards which don't register the click until it's changed pages. Though I've recently seen one that at least lets you change your vote.


Problem? Friends voting for friends is the whole *point* of most contest events. "TP in your friends so they can vote for you (and jack up our traffic)."