Pseudonymous comment posting…

(N.B. If you’re one of my regular posters, I promise this is not about you. Part of this content is directed at a specific poster who will have no doubt that it refers to him or her.)

So today I had an interesting experience.

Someone posted a comment which was a little fishy to one of my older posts. Ok, really fishy. I’m not stupid, after all.

I won’t explain what was wrong with it or why, but let’s just say that in spite of the story intended to obfuscate the identity of the poster, it was pretty obvious who it came from, just from the ill-crafted anecdote. As I’ve said before, most people give themselves away with what they say, even if they are technically savvy enough to cover their tracks.

But let me just say this – if you’re not technically savvy enough to cover your tracks, don’t bother. And no, giving a fake e-mail address is not enough. Given the way ISPs work, and how infrequently your IP address will generally change, not only is it often possible to tell where generally your comment came from (state, city, whatever), it is often possible to tell where exactly it came from (as in, in this case, which house that IP was assigned to when it was sent). And if the receiver just happens to have also, say, received e-mail from you recently, and knows where to look in the headers, the receiver can compare IP addresses and know definitively where it came from.

In general, unless the comment is abusive, I don’t pay any attention to where my posters come from – I figure that’s private information.

But as I’ve said before, you’re never really anonymous on the internet. Technically savvier people have ways of hiding their trails, but this poster does not have those skills.

To the poster in question: Gotcha. Quit while you’re behind. I didn’t spend all of those years doing this for nothing.

You should be very, very embarrassed, especially given what you were trying to do.