Our admin wrote some duplicate scripts that takes several digital fingerprints into account. There are the basics that catch entry level trolls (e.g. signing up for a new account from the same self hosted domain), but this goes a
lot deeper. While we don't know if meirl was one poster, or a gestalt entity using many names, let us just say that each of the accounts are flagged very early and they all have a distinct set of attributes that make them easy to flag. For example, the account Temp0 was flagged very early, so we give it a little time to breathe and ended up taking three of them out once the mound of evidence became overwhelming.
There are several more accounts that have not posted yet, a few more that have not posted
contentiously yet and some we are monitoring as they are approaching the limit of warnings and actions we've applied. We still treat all accounts as though they are genuine until we have unequivocal audit trails and evidence that they are basically ignoring reasonable requests in lieu of trolling/being antagonistic. I guess they all chat somwhere else and think they're flying under the radar because they're being subtle. Which is not the case, they're already on the radar. So we prefer to let them waste their time for a bit, crafting posts that have to look genuine but have undertones of trolling, before they double down. At which point we're waiting.
Yup.