cross posted with Hsing, but i agree with what she's said. Seeing as she raised the central issue that prompted this thread, I'll bring it up...

I was concerned about mentioning this in case it inspires anyone to hunt down ways to circumvent it, but yes, we can monitor IP numbers.

This is not a perfect science, because of the way in which IP numbers are assigned. For example, QueenYnci and Chrisjordan both post under the same IP number, as do a number of other posters.

AOL uses some funky and ugly server methods which mean you rarely ever access the internet directly, and they assign the same IP number to a number of people, who access the AOL servers rather than the internet. Thus, eight people all under one IP number, and it's only because we know that CJ is the real troll that we don't get paranoid about the rest of them.

Some ISPs use proxy servers, others use dynamic IP assignment, and plenty use a model similar to AOL. the end result is that you can see several IP numbers used by a single poster. I've posted from at least three or four, since I do not have a 'static' IP address. Buzzfloyd uses the same IP numbers that I do, because we share the same internet connection. If I'm posting from 1.2.3.4, so is Buzzfloyd. It's the same internet connection, just on two computers.

However, despite all the risk of people on the same ISP sharing the same IP numbers (a concern when we IP banned Jaunty), I think it's only the cases where people are sharing the same connection (like Buzzfloyd and I) that we will actually see IP numbers being an issue. Our IP designation is dynamic. Every time I connect, in theory I get a new number. There's a very small pool that we get to draw from for that, so if you ban one of the IP numbers we use, it will probably affect us 90% of the time, but not affect anyone else ever.

The IP banning is most dangerous to people who use a static IP number. These are almost unheard of for dialups, and not common for most DSL these days. But, a static IP number is a very iron clad 'fingerprint' of where you've been posting.

And it just so happens that I saw someone posting under two accounts on a static IP number, hence this thread. Who? Well, now if I said that, I'd be looking paranoid... so give me a moment and I'll make a new thread on that.

"If I wanted to read Wuthering Heights, I'd shoot my self."