Board Thread:New on Lego Message Boards Wiki/@comment-1693968-20140119003844/@comment-1693968-20140120170943

Katuchim wrote: Yesterday Obi told me that CheckUser is a serious thing not to be joked about. And now Drew tell us that it's no big deal at all. If IPs are 'as easy to find as your username,' why do we even need CheckUsers?

But anyways, to be a proper obedient little user, not question authority, and answer what I was asked, I'm fine with Obi taking this position, though I'm not so sure about BCG. Not that I don't trust my Big Brother Best Friend Forever (yeah right, it's really because I'm sure he'd have no problem finding out whatever he wanted), but couldn't we pick someone a teeny tiny bit more active? But then, maybe that's not a problem, because I've not heard of anyone's IP being checked in all my time here, but if it never happens why do we need CheckUsers anyways? I should stop thinking if I only go in circles.

I apologize, I didn't mean to downplay the seriousness of CheckUser. It's a very serious tool, and does offer the ability to invade privacy if misused. However, in order to invade that privacy, the IP has to be research further than the details provided by the CheckUser tool. Even then, the amount of privacy lost is minimal. The person attempting to invade your privacy would be able to find out what state you live in, at best.

My point in the previous post was simply that if someone as respected as BCG wants to collect information on random people, then even if he were to hypothetically abuse CheckUser, he would not be given any more information than he would have already collected. Also, like Obi said, I was exaggerating my comment on usernames. It takes a fair amount of knowledge and skill to be able to obtain an IP address, while anyone can go and find your username. My point there was that it's not very difficult to get an IP if you have the knowledge to do so.

With all of that being said, CheckUser is a very important tool. It allows for you to view a ton of details related to IP addresses. You can find all the edits or accounts used by an IP, among other less notable things. Without, it would be nearly impossible for us to be aware of dupes, allowing for a massive amount of potential conflict.

In response to your last couple of sentences, CheckUser is actually used quite often. I don't believe that I have ever CheckUser'd someone's main account, with a couple of exceptions with users who were notorious for creating dupes. CheckUser is almost always run on newer accounts, which meet one of the requirements described by our CheckUser policy. It's definitely an essential tool to any wiki with duplicate accounts, and this wiki is meets that requirement easily.