IP from his Internet provider.
Some ISPs provide dynamic or rotating addresses, which could have resulted in a collision.
Units of evil are also collected by "neighboring" IPs:
When you register, the IP that you used when you submitted the registration form is used to calculate your evilness. The more frequently this IP or its neighbors were banned, the more evil is associated with your account.
Some (old) stats:
In the last 30 days:
- 16441 users registered.
- 4040 required a fee, and the average required fee among them was 0.00127297 BTC.
- 99 paid the fee, and the average fee paid was 0.00116449 BTC.
I'm not necessarily bothered by the number of accounts abandoned due to fees, since many of those will probably be spammers searching for a no-fee IP. The fees actually paid (by people who are presumably not spammers) may be a bit high, though: I feel like it should be about a tenth of that.
The last sentence is what this topic is about: if there are 99 paying users, I reckon there may very well be be more non-spammers who instantly abandened their account.
Though would it be a good idea to, let's say, instead of permanently blocking newbies with evil score, give them a 14 days restriction to familiarize themselves to the forum? Like every person who registers in an IP address with blue or less evil score will have to wait 14 days to post in the forum.
I've registered to forums that made me wait a few days before I could post. That's terribly annoying! But if you're a spammer who registers hundreds of accounts, the 14 days don't matter at all. Take a look at
loyce.club/patrol/: almost all of the first posts made by 100 new users are spam. And that's
despite the current restrictions on new users.