If Sagebrush knows when to use "me" and when to use "I" in a simple grade-school sentence, then he is probably not Maxx, after all, though they've had one heck of an amazing mutual echo chamber going for a long time, so it's hard to believe they are two complete strangers.
I've never ever had more than one account here, though I found it kind of amusing when one denier once upon a time (I think he got himself a life many moons ago and has departed here) was absolutely dedicated to accusing me repeatedly and heatedly of being Dana.
It seems multiple accounts are fairly rare, in this section, but those who use them are (intermittently) quite active. One jerk with a grudge getting his jollies doing nothing but stalking certain people and thumbs-downing everything they do can it make it look like the whole section is infested with cheating aliases. I was hounded like that (as badly as Maxx is now) for many weeks, and then rather suddenly it stopped, coincidentally with a certain flagrantly lying anti-science denier taking a leave of absence from the section.
I think the record will / would show that multiple accounting in the global warming category is more commonly practiced by deniers, but for sure there are non-deniers actively using multiple accounts too. I've also read, a number of times, that the problem is worse in other categories + I consider false reporting a more serious problem than thumbs-downing anyway. Finally, what happened to the YA pilot project where you could classify answers, but not hide them by thumbs-downing?
Edit: Even JimZ manages to say something truthful and accurate once in a while. It's true, and I've never denied it, that I block him and other hard-core anti-science deniers. I've said this before, but on the assumption that a few honest people with open minds might still be interested: UNLIKE multiple accounts, blocking is EXPRESSLY allowed and permitted by the rules of YA. It's a function of the site, not some evil virus that has infected it. This is hard for many people to understand, because many are under the unsurprising yet incorrect MISimpression that YA is some kind of "discussion" or "debating" forum. Even Pegminer who surely knows better calls it a "forum." Read the guidelines: "Yahoo! Answers is a community of questions and answers, not a chat room. If a post is neither a question nor an answer, it doesn’t belong here." http://answers.yahoo.com/info/community_guidelines;_ylt=Atna6GM4LUYT0ngqcKmDXfvj1KIX;_ylv=3 Those are the actual rules, even if almost every regular here DOES "chat" like I am doing right now here. Dedicated deniers of science (I categorically exclude thereby a huge number of ill-informed passers-by, desperate students procrastinating too long on homework, etc.) are, however, not just occasionally or periodically, but usually and by pure definition NOT here to "pose and answer questions"; they come here to blow smoke, disrupt, deceive, disinform, confuse and sabotage, and parade their often laughable stupidity and arrogant ignorance. There are gazillions of examples of this in the resolved questions. I look forward to the PhD thesis written using that incredible source. If you are serious about getting honest answers to genuine questions, you have little choice but to EITHER put up with bucket loads of endless BS (every idiotic pre-fab lie debunked years ago already on skepticalscience.org) semi-literately endless copied and pasted OR block at least the most egregious sabateurs of information-seeking questions and answers.
That said, I'm not fond of the blocking function here. It's too blunt. If I want to ask a question and let JimZ, for example, answer it, I can't do so without giving him access to ALL my questions. Roughly 1/4 to 1/3 of my first 100 or so Qs and As were "reported" and vaporized, and in almost all cases I had said or done nothing that others hadn't done thousands of times. If I recall correctly, there was even an instance or two where one of my resolved questions was zapped into oblivion by being "reported." Even deniers (ones I hadn't blocked) chimed in to say they saw nothing whatever "violating" about such questions (when I asked). Unfortunately, there is only ONE sure-fire way of stopping your questions from being vaporized at will, and that is to block the vaporizers from access to them.
The much more important reason why I block, however, is to reduce the endless dumping of the same old prefab anti-science lies whenever I ask a question. Ottawa Mike, for example, despite his long-standing, though lately dodging, denial of science, does not do this, and I don't block him.