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I'm hoping that someone who understands IP Addresses better than I do can explain if observing duplicates (up to 6X) in the first 7 or so digits of IP addresses among 400 respondents to an online survey is likely a sign of bots.

Benji
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  • What makes sense also depends on how you recruit participants. If a teacher asked their students to take your survey during a lab lesson, they would easily all have nearby IP addresses, for example. – tripleee Dec 26 '22 at 09:25

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hmm.... IPV4 address are made up of 4 bytes If the first 3 of those 4 bytes where the same for entries in succession I would be very suspicious. If i saw that, I would look at the responses to see if they where the same. You might also want to look up the Domain names for the IP Addresses.

If I was going to do this I would likely just turn up some images in my favorite cloud provider so they had different IP addresses and use them to send responces to the survey. I suspect I would use only pennies of CPU time and turning up 10 to 20 instances is a very easy thing to do.

Just my thought....

Dave
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