Alt account detection

Staff++ provides a way to be notified when it thinks a user is using alternative accounts. The detection is really simple so don't expect miracles. It will detect the most basic and obvious alt accounts. Alt detection is disabled by default

Configuration

alt-detect-module:
  enabled: true
  # will not send out any notification unless at least the IPs are matching
  same-ip-required: false

How it works

Ip similarity

When enabled the system will start recording players IP addresses. Every address a player ever connects with gets stored. If a player connects with the same address as another player his detection score is upped by 1.

Username similarity

When a player connects we check his username against all other users known to the server. Similarity is calculated using the Levenshtein Distance Algorithm. Based on this a score is returned:

• 70% similarity --> score 3

• 50% similarity --> score 2

• 30% similarity --> score 1

Detection trust levels (score)

The trust level is the result of the above mentioned checks. We have four levels of trust:

Trust Level	score	Description
POSITIVE	5	Only one case can trigger the POSITIVE level. When a username has an IP match and a username match of at least 70%. We can be fairly certain something is going on with these accounts
FAIRLY_POSITIVE	4	Triggered when username match is between 50% and 70% and IP is matching. Or when username match is at least 70% and IP is not matching.
POSSIBLE	3	Triggered when username match is between 30% and 50% and IP is matching. Or when username match is between 50% and 70%, and IP is not matching.
NOT_LIKELY	2	Triggered when username match is between 30% and 50% and IP is not matching. In general I would not recommend listening to alerts with this trust level as most likely this will not be a reliable result
SAME_IP	1	Triggered when IP is matching but there is no username similarity.

If the option same-ip-required is set, no level is triggered unless the ip is matching as well

Listening to events

Currently Staff++ supports 2 ways of being notified when an alt account is detected.

• The alerting system (in-game)

• Through Discord (Integration plugin)

Whitelisting Accounts

Since some accounts might actually not be real alt accounts but still trigger the system, a whitelist is added to ensure that staff members can ignore these false positives.

The ignore a match you can use the /altwhitelist command.

• /altwhitelist add playerName1 playerName2

• /altwhitelist remove playerName1 playerName2

• /altwhitelist list pagenumber PageNumber is optional.

This will add or remove certain user combinations from the whitelist. When added to the whitelist this users combination will never trigger a detection event. Adding a combination to the whitelist tells the system that these 2 accounts are not alts.