Is it reliable to use the IP address to identify a user on your website?

Question

Here is my situation. I am part of a project creating a P2P charity website, where users connect and can give money to one another. Because of the nature of the site, we kno

Answer 1

There is a dicussion board I am part of that bans sock puppets ( that is, multiple accounts by the same user ). They have no means of automatically detecting them, becasue there is no means of definitively identifying them. IP addresses are captured, because they can be used to help identify sock puppets, but I know that the process of identifying these is laborious, manual, and error-prone.

This is only undertaken when there is suspicion that someone is using sock puppets for malicious or disruptive purposes. In your case, there is no real answer other than careful and manual monitoring of usage habits, using the information that you gather about users to attempt to identify suspicious habits. But you also have to accept that 80% of sock puppets will go undetected, and do what you can to warn other users of the possibility.

Your bigger issue, incidentally, may be Munchausen by Internet which we were also caught by.