Clarification on shared accounts please

[gtpcaine]

Hi,

I recently made a new account for the stewards in my race series to share, so any of us can edit the OP, add new drivers, series updates etc as and when we need to. One of the main reason's was due to the series owner having network issues at the time. So the thread was never kept up to date, thus resulting in new entrants missing rule changes etc due to them being in the middle of the thread. This has been made worse recently, due to his PS3 now hitting the dust, him pulling out of the series, and us now making a new thread on the eve of the series starting.

Now, I have just been informed by a Moderator, that this isn't aloud, and that's fair enough. I accept that. But I would like to know why this is the case. It makes running a race series a lot more efficient and neater.

Another option I can see, is allow the OP to assign 'moderators' to the thread. So the stewards can use their own account, but still edit the main posts in the thread. Or just editable posts by allowed people. So the OP can set the first 4 posts as editable by user_a, user_b and user_c, but the OP's other posts remain un-editable.

Obviously I will go with whatever the rules dictate, but just some clarification on this would be much appreciated.

 

[Jordan]

Shared or "pool" accounts are not allowed because it violates our one-account-per-person rule and complicates the matter of restricting access to users who we no longer want to be part of the site. For example, if a user who has access to a shared account is banned, it puts the staff and everyone else involved with that shared account in a difficult position - and that's just the beginning.

What if someone is using the account to cause trouble, or gets in an argument with a problematic user in the league? What if nobody admits to that abuse? Do we have to spend time researching who the actual abusive user might be? What if we can't figure out who it is and we must ban the shared account? What happens to all the threads and resources those league managers depended upon? What if someone with access to a shared account changes the account credentials over a disagreement with the other league managers? How would the forum staff resolve these types of conflicts, which could impact dozens or even hundreds of users in league?

These are issues which you might consider irrelevant to your circle of friends (and they probably are), but with tens of thousands of users accessing the site every day, they are issues our staff would encounter on at least a weekly basis, and it introduces another level of administrative complexity which we aren't prepared to deal with.

I absolutely recognize that it's a serious problem, and I'm developing a special set of league management tools which will address the core issue in a better way than shared accounts or shared editing post permissions, but it's going to take a bit more time before I can roll these changes out.

 

[gtpcaine]

Thanks for that mate, understood. Glad to hear something is in the pipeline. You will still probably beat PD to the 'community features!