Having two accounts that have both accumulated enough XP to reach the level of "ability to approve / consider" is tantamount to violating site policy. People have actually lost access to site privileges that they took years to achieve in part due to actions just headed in the direction of ending up with such a scenario. More people have been forced off that path long before getting there.
Having multiple accounts is discouraged in general. Having multiple accounts without informing the gods is a violation of site policy and has lead to loss of site privileges. There are a lot of known cases of multiple accounts that are grudgingly tolerated (to varying degrees). There have been a few cases of multiple accounts that are completely acceptable (im2, for example), most of which have passed out of use already.
Many of the gods have one separate account that is in gods and that they only use when doing maintenance work that requires the higher privileges (for reasons similar to why most people don't spend all day logged in as 'root' but instead use only 'sudo' when the need arises).
For example, tye is my account. I only use it for maintenance / administrative work. It would have to double its accumulated XP and rise 3 levels in order to reach the point where approval / consideration is granted. It stopped accumulating non-trivial amounts of XP a very long time ago. The only reason it gained as much XP as it had is because it existed for a long time during which the best practices on multiple accounts were much less clear (at least to me). If I had been promoted to gods more recently, my maintenance account would probably never end up accumulating significant XP.
Now, since tye is a member of gods, it actually can approve nodes and consider nodes and vote on considerations. I almost never use it for any of those activities. Using it along with tye to cast multiple votes on the same consideration would most often simply be an abuse of my godsly authority, sometimes less so than others.
There have been a few times when I have actually voted twice on the same consideration as part of an unusual administrative task. Almost always that was done only because it was more convenient than achieving the same results through different means. For example, there have been particularly obnoxious node(s) needing to be reaped more quickly than usual where tye's vote turned out to be the 4th vote and it was trivial to have tye  cast a vote to trigger the reaping while it is more work to use gods-only tools to reap a node w/o invoking consideration voting.
So, it is indeed technically possible for one person to vote on a consideration twice or to approve their own node. But, in practice, that really only applies to gods (who can do such things without even bothering with a second account anyway) and to people posting a node anonymously and then approving it non-anonymously.
If a situation came up in which it became appropriate for one person to have two accounts, both with high XP, then (similar to voting on nodes) changes would likely soon be made to the site in order to actually disallow that (except for the case of gods where any code trying to disallow something would never be more than an inconvenience so we must rely on social tools to make the gods behave instead). Those limitations have not been implemented because there should be no way for them to matter.
I believe (but I'm not sure about all this) that if you have multiple accounts, you can approve your post from another account, and you can vote to a consideration twice.
So I find that paragraph at least close to misleading. I certainly find the observation of no practical value. :)
- tye
In reply to Re^2: Backdoor to approving one's own node
by tye
in thread Backdoor to approving one's own node
by Lady_Aleena
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