I, too, was under the impression that usernames must be unique. Yes, those are certainly duplicates, according to super search: https://perlmonks.org/?node=OliviaB.

I have an inkling that username sanitation happens at the wrong time during registration, like removing a space at the end after the database has been checked for duplicates. But that's pure speculation at this point. I'll have a quick peek in PmDev, but i doubt i'll find anything on my own...

Hopefully it's not possible to unlock accounts, else there could potentially be 2 accounts with the same name.

gods can unlock as well as lock accounts. It's rare to unlock an account. Obviously, when we do that, we have to be very careful for that exact reason.

But you can recognize the "resurrected" by checking their missing scratchpad.

update

I just realized that "new" Olivia was reaped/locked again. That's debatable, I didn't see any violation in the new post, that's why I didn't consider it.

Though it most probably was a trial balloon to test our reactions.

In that case we could just automatize this ...

Perhaps (s)he wanted to try out whether names of banned users must be unique, too? 🤔

Fortunately, the spammers spend very close to zero time actually figuring out how this site works. Spammers are corporate entities; and they have their own ways of creating user names, which in general are not the real names of people. I suspect they have a stock of usernames they keep using over and over. So it's actually better to let them use the same name repeatedly, as that makes them easier to track.

If that's the way it's always been, and you're happy with this, then all's well. It didn't look right to me; hence the Does this need investigation?.

Thanks for the replies.

I agree it doesn't look right, but...

The gods have to spend much energy fighting spammers.

Sometimes they don't want to go into details and publicly reveal their strategies.

Sometimes the status quo is good enough, and there is no time for more.

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}