Dronebogus

Dronebogus (talk+ · tag · contribs · deleted contribs · logs · filter log · block user · spi block · block log · CA · CheckUser(log) · investigate · cuwiki)
For archived investigations, see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Dronebogus/Archive.

01 October 2023

– A user has requested CheckUser. An SPI clerk will shortly look at the case and endorse or decline the request.

Suspected sockpuppets

It is with a great deal of disappointment that I file this SPI request. I have made every effort to have this looked into discreetly, so that this user's name is not dragged through the mud, but upon the recommendation of multiple parties who have reviewed the evidence, I am filing this public SPI.

I have a strong suspicion that Dronebogus is a prolific sockmaster, who has targeted me with multiple sockpuppets over the course of nearly a year. Another user, Skyerise, also reached the same conclusion about Dronebogus, in a different topic area, after multiple years of interacting with different sockpuppets.

I recently discovered that the socks that Skyerise suspects of being run by Dronebogus and the socks that I suspect of being run by Dronebogus are being run by the same sock master. Here is the background:

In December 2022, Dronebogus started following me around on en.wiki. Hatting/closing active discussions, reverting edits, following me from page to page, and being generally hostile and obnoxious, which seems to be a pattern.

In mid-January 2023, a "new" user and obvious sockpuppet called Vizorblaze was created, for one reason: to follow me from page to page being obnoxious. The attitude was strikingly similar to Dronebogus, but even more over the top. Nobody else has treated me this way - Dronebogus and Vizorblaze are extreme outliers.

Dronebogus greeted the new sockpuppet, and then something odd happened. Dronebogus went from interacting with me multiple times a day, on nearly every single page at which I was involved, to completely ceasing his pattern of interaction with me within a day or two. Vizorblaze, on the other hand, got more and more vitriolic towards me before eventually getting banned.

As the previously linked SPI indicates, Vizorblaze continued harassing me through various accounts and IPs, and continues to do so to this day. 3 ANI threads have been started by the sockpuppets just in the past week. Dronebogus is still very active, as am I, but he completely dropped off and has never, interacted with me again, ever since a day or two after Vizorblaze and his socks started targeting me.

That's my experience, which is related to the experience of a user named Skyerise, who's been around for over 15 years. For multiple years, they've experienced harassment from a sock puppet army at pages like "Chaos magic" and related titles. Skyerise has paid close attention to these pages for years and years, and is quite familiar with the attitude and behavior of these sockpuppets. The sock puppet army has been tied to the user Raxythecat.

Approximately 24 hours before the creation of Vizorblaze, Skyerise made a rather bold claim: Raxythecat is Dronebogus.

Skyerise said "...it's not your edits that identify you. It's your attitude. That's why I waited to see what you would say when you inevitably reverted me before filing the report." - This summarizes my view of Vizorblaze perfectly. The attitude is unmistakable. I've never had any other editor interact with me with this sort of attitude, and it is exactly the attitude that Dronebogus exhibits towards myself and others.

Now, Skyerise has felt uneasy about the Raxythecat-Dronebogus connection for months, as have I with the Vizorblaze-Dronebogus connection. However, I decided to move forward with this in a serious way when I learned the following:

Per NinjaRobotPirate's comment at the bottom of this thread, Raxythecat and Vizorblaze are likely run by the same sock master.

I think that the sock master is Dronebogus, and so does Skyerise - and we reached that conclusion independently, without previously communicating with one another about it, working in different topic areas, over a period of years, based on Dronebogus' unmistakable, distinctive bad attitude, which is well documented.

I sure wish that someone would be willing to do a CU and see if Dronebogus is indeed operating in a similar IP range as these sockpuppets. If the CU comes up positive, it will put an end to this. If it comes up negative, it will also put an end to this, as I will apologize to Dronebogus and move on.

I also have circumstantial evidence, such as edit interaction analyses and overlap between usernames, that suggest to me and others that Vizorblaze and Raxythecat are not Dronebogus' only sockpuppets. One account that I've analyzed is Dronebogus1. I will present this evidence upon request, but for the sake of brevity, I won't say more now. Philomathes2357 (talk) 22:21, 1 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

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