Subject: IP addresses
Author:
Posted on: 2008-08-10 20:40:00 UTC
I just noticed this ... has this board always been showing our IP addresses on our posts? Can it be shut off? That's a pretty serious privacy (and security) issue.
Has any thought ever been given to moving to a more conventional sort of forum system?
I'd rather we stayed here. There's loads of good things about this board, all already listed. If you're particularily worried about your IP address, I'd reccomend using a proxy.
(that is to say, when I was a newbie.)
We've tried a few different alternate forums - one on livejournal, one on Proboards, and I think there was a third as well. None of them took off, though, and I think there's a few basic issues.
Firstly, the thread setup here on the board is quite unique, I have yet to find another place like it. I like being able to see every single post made from the index, I think it adds something to the community.
Secondly, there's a matter of momentum - we've been here for a very long time, getting up and moving would be all kinds of hassle. There are those who have left (either temporarily or permanently) because of security issues (virii, adware, etcetera), but ultimately, if you have decent protection (Firefox, ad-aware, AVG, etcetera), you should be fine - I've never had any trouble with it.
As an addendum to the previous point, there are a lot of websites that link to us here, many of which are no longer updated. If we were to move, we'd be a lot harder for newbies to find, which is a Bad Thing.
There are ways to get around the IP address display - I connect from a big university, where I could be any of twenty thousand people. It would be a lot easier to find and read my livejournal to work out who I am, rather than try to IP trace through my school.
On a more practical note, there are a lot of proxy servers available on the internet - how they work is that you send your internet traffic through them, and it all gets stamped with their IP address rather than yours. I wouldn't trust the free ones with any important data (passwords, credit card numbers, home addresses), but for surfing the Board, they're reasonable.
Finally, if you're really paranoid, there's TOR, which is like a proxy server, but way better. I don't understand all the ins and outs, but a system built to get anonymous traffic through the Great Firewall of China without revealing its source is going to be very, very good. It's also free.
I like the IP addresses, myself - they give just a touch less anonymity, which has come in handy in the past for spotting sockpuppets, trolls, and the like.
Oh, I fully understand the use of proxy servers, much to the frustration of one badfic writer who has this idea that she can keep me from commenting on her badfic (and it is very, very bad) on her blog. TOR is a royal pain in the neck. As for the sockpuppets, trolls, and whatnot, they know about proxy servers too. Unfortunately. One of the first things I learned as a forum admin was never to underestimate the persistence and inventiveness of trolls; you've never seen it all.
I'll admit that not many forums use this format, although off the top of my head, I can think of Slashdot and Groklaw having a user option for a similar layout. I know Groklaw runs GeekLog; not sure what Slashdot is using but I think it's proprietary. There's a down side to this, though. It's very hard for someone, especially someone new to the forum, to find something from more than a few days ago. There is a lot of community history here, but it's all inaccessible behind some very large number of presses of the Next Page button, or getting lucky with the limited Search if there's something in particular you're looking for. A more conventional forum would allow that history to remain readily accessible (and browseable) to the community, newbie as well as veteran.
I suppose I'm mildly annoyed with myself over the IP issue; if I'd noticed that before I posted, I would have been using a proxy all along. Guess it's time to talk to my ISP for a change of IP, and use a proxy. *sigh*
I'd still like an EDIT button, though, and topic organization, and an archive of everyone's PPC stories all in one place, and user profiles, and a pony.
While I can't pretend to know the first thing about the technical ins and outs of proxy servers and whatnot, I have to admit, losing old topics isn't much fun. For example, when Trojie and I discussed making the PPC Movie, we were both aware that the posts for the 2008 Sue Invasion had been shunted off the Board into the ether. It was only thanks to JulyFlame's brilliant foresightedness in saving the posts that the project was able to go ahead. If we could find a way to store them, that would be an extremely good idea. And an EDIT button would probably be appreciated by just about every SPAG Nazi on here.
However, I first found this Board, just the way it is, and I wouldn't change it for anything. I may be a newbie compared to the other people commenting on this topic, but I like the Board just the way it is. I'm very fond of this place. So I might not have any technical advice or even other useful comments to make, but my attachment to the Board as it is leads me to join my voice with the others who don't want to change.
But what's so special about this board?
Is it the specific software that it runs on?
Or is it the people, the community, the friendliness, the silliness, the stories, and all that?
Changing the software wouldn't change the people. We can have software that does good things (like saving posts forever) without changing anything about the people.
If we really want only one section, then we can have only one section, and post everything in there. In fact, doing that would make it a lot easier to see the newest posts than it is here, where you have to scroll down the page and try to spot them. Depending on the forum software, we could probably even skin it to look pretty much like this board.
to be perfectly honest, while everyone seems to agree that the Board isn't perfect, we're happy with it. It's always been like this, it works just fine, and to be honest, nobody seems to mind too much about its flaws.
I can appreciate wholeheartedly that going somewhere else would have a lot of advantages, but we're happy right here. We know where it is, we don't need to try altering links and all that just for the sake of a few extra gadgets and amenities.
Moving somewhere else, even if it looks and behaves almost the same, won't be the same. It'd be like turning your bed round in your room so it faces a completely different direction- awkward and a struggle to get used to. Sure, we might grow into it after a while, but for the lurkers it'd be really difficult because, well, they lurk. It could be lack of access, or simply not having enough time, but they can't get to the Board as often as others and our suddenly changing things would throw them.
I know it sounds like I'm being stubborn and awkward and argulg just for the sake of it, but the truth is I really don't want to move.
And yes, a more conventional forum system has been discussed many, many times, but it always gets shot down.
The IP addresses have been on here since the dawn of this version of the board. Other boards have been suggested and some have actually made it into the beta stage, but they all fell though.
I personally would not want to go to another board system, this one works just fine. Old threads get pushed off, there is no bump up of threads, and everything is right here on one page.
Now there are some things that I don`t like (such as the threads having writting under them in the topic lines) but it has worked for a long time (I have been posting since 2002).
So while it has been tried, I would not want to go to another board system. And, I am fine with having the IP addresses showing, since they help to eliminate trolls.
Leto
Here's the problem:
It's not hackers I'm worried about; it's butthurt fanbrats.
There are a number of ways to get someone's IP address. For example, it's usually visible to forum admins and blog owners. There are a number of us, I believe, who use different names here than we do where we actually post our fanfic (myself included). I try to maintain a certain amount of separation between this identity and my writing identity, for I think obvious reasons. Revenge reviews are no fun.
Basically, with this system, anyone who has access to my other identity's IP (and there are quite a few ways to get it that I'm not going to go into) can find the connection between the two with a bit of googling. And, honestly, I'm really not comfortable with that.
There's rather a lot you can find out about someone from their IP, by the way. For instance, one of you is from the El Paso, Texas, area, while another one is in Japan. Not necessarily an important bit of information in and of itself, but as one data point out of many, it can help build up a profile of you. As an example, in the process of hunting down a troublemaker, in an hour or so of work I'd found her real name, her parents' names and employers, her employer, the school she graduated from, pictures of her and her mother, and a sufficiently in-depth profile of her interests, hobbies, etc., that I could have posed as her if I'd wanted to. (also, I found that she wrote really really bad slash) What did I have to start with? A FFN pen name.
If we want to look into an alternative, there are a lot of them out there. For instance, GoDaddy has a package for about fifty bucks a year that includes a website, forums, blogging, etc. I'm not sure if it comes with wiki support or not, but we could certainly install our own, something like MediaWiki. A year of that, plus domain name registration, would cost sixty bucks. If we put up a PayPal donation button and a dozen PPCers kicked in five bucks each -- the price of lunch at a fast food place -- we'd have our own site and not have to worry about a sudden crisis when the folks who host our wiki, or board, or anything else, suddenly shut down. Hell, we could run our own fanfic archive for PPC stories.
I only mentioned GoDaddy because I've used them in the past; I'm sure there are other deals as good or better available from other vendors.
With our own forums, we'd have search capabilities, we'd have history, we'd be able to keep spammers out, we could organize things so that the badfic reports aren't all tangled up with welcome messages that are all mixed in with links to new stories, and so on. Sure, this still works, but there are things that would be good to have it do that it can't and won't ever be able to do. Just having a login system that works would be nice, not to mention user profiles, links to our stories, sorting posts by categories, spam suppression, and getting rid of the ads.
I'm feeling like I'm being an annoying, pushy newbie here, barging in and telling all the people whose community it really is, the people who built it and gave it life, how they should be doing things. I'm really not trying to do that. I respect all of you like you wouldn't believe (I've been reading some of your stories for a long time) and I'm not really trying to be an asshat. It's just that if we can have something that fits the needs of the community better than what we have now, if it's more secure for all of us, and if it can be done easily, why not do it?
Tell me to shut up if I'm getting above my place here. Honestly, despite how it may appear, I'm trying to contribute to the community, not to criticize how things have been done since time immemorial.
I have to say that I'd much rather we stick to what we have. True, WC, another forum could be more sophisticated, but quite frankly, I like the simplicity here - having multiple subsections for different categories annoys me immensely, as it often means having to check six different pages while looking for interesting updates... which isn't to say that every other type of forum would necessarily have that (I'm no expert, but I don't think that's the case), but still.
I ramble. Again. Must break that habit. In any case, while a new board is definitely possible and practical, I really don't see it happening. I'm not an 'oldbie' by any means, but every place will have something about it we dislike, and as long as this one has relatively few, there's not much incentive to leave. I become quite grumpy when I notice a typo after posting, but so what? I'll live, and no one around here really cares about little mistakes; they can, in fact, make for a good laugh, or spark some creativie manifestation in HQ.
Most significantly for me, I wouldn't want to be one of those former members who might decide to come back, only to be faced with a blank page and a small chance of finding the real activity. Call me soft-hearted, but I wouldn't want to do that to anyone. (Including myself, should I ever have need to vanish for a few months.)
*shrugs* There's more than enough experienced people with better points, but that's my say.
...it often means having to check six different pages while looking for interesting updates...
Most modern forum software has a button for "show me all the posts since my last visit" which takes care of that for you, and not even any need to scroll all the way down the page like here. That's one of the things I miss here, actually.
...I wouldn't want to be one of those former members who might decide to come back, only to be faced with a blank page and a small chance of finding the real activity...
Which is why there would be a nice bit obvious post here saying "We've moved over to the-ppc.org" and providing a link.
Everything on the Board gets wiped, sooner than later, and there've been occasions where everything NOT on the main page gets deleted.
Also, while putting a "O hai, we moved to here" would work in the short term, in the long term what would happen is that eventually that post would disappear forever and the board would be shut down from lack of activity. The yourwebapps.com people do regular purges of unused sites and old content on their forums.
Quite frankly, I know you're trying to be polite and helpful insofar as suggesting this, but what is happening is that you're beginning to come off as pushy and insistent because you're still pushing the topic after a majority has already posted why they'd rather stay with this topic, and I know several more people are avoidig posting in here so that no one's feelings get hurt.
My feelings are quite durable, so if by some chance it's mine you're worrying about, don't.
Nobody told me to stop responding to points people raised, so I thought it was still okay to answer posts in this thread. I'll be quiet.
I'm not concerned especially for your feelings right now, since it's pretty obvious that you can stand up for yourself and your opinion without getting especially hurt by disagreement.
It's the people who are not replying to this because they don't want to get hurt in the process, or people like Sedri who have already replied and feel hurt, that I'm concerned about right now.
And no one was really going to tell you "Shut up, we don't care for this topic anymore", because for one, we're polite, and two, most of us are still willing to reply.
I'm just saying that maybe this conversation should end for now before too many people get upset. When both sides continuously repeat themselves and neither side is giving in, it's a good time to stop.
Annoyed, but not hurt; my feelings are pretty tough - tougher than many, I might add, which is why I would certainly appreciate a little more consideration, just as a general courtesy.
You're right, too - this conversation ought to stop here. Maybe I shouldn't even post this; I may regret it. Still, I won't post on this thread again - promise. I've said my pieec.
It was the feeling that was important there, WC, not the particular arguments
*sigh* It's too late; I'm going to bed. I really don't care what happens as long as everyone's happy. Including me.
But, like I said, this has been hashed and rehashed and discussed over and to death, over the past few years that I can remember. Every time we get a serious troll (and I mean a Serious Troll-- ask anyone about the Sergeant Heretic/Union Jack affair), the issue comes up.
I think we're just too deeply rooted here.
(also I believe that if Huinesoron were here he would add many reasons, which I cannot remember, but one of which is that he has said several times that he will not move from this location, as is the same with quite a few others, I think.)
One of the reasons, too, that I think came up last time was that we've been here for so long that this is where people look for us now, and we might throw a confusing trail if we moved, as well as that this board would fall into disarray.
But yeah, you've got an opinion, and no one here is going to jump down your throat (well... I kind of did, but not in a totally aggressive way?) for voicing it. Don't be shy!
And I've always had an open policy regarding my name or location. There's no point in me doing anything that'd ruin my reputation online or in real life in the long run. I don't hold the opinion that online activity and what you do in real life is going to be as separate as it is in a few years.
And it comes to those 'butthurt fanbrats', however, pretty much none of them have the ability to understand what to do with that IP address, though. It takes real understanding to bother to do that, and pretty much all of them don't have that understanding.
As to the idea of the PPC getting its own website, that sort of thing is tricky. Yes, we /could/, and if several people help out at once it makes it easy to afford it. But then we get down to various nitty gritty problems. Such as is it really a good idea to do that? Who would manage the account? What would we do if they dropped off the face of the earth? And so forth. Not to mention most of us are underage or still living under our parents' thumbs. A bit difficult to explain why you need to use one of the credit cards, I would think.
And there's another reason for us to stay here besides the fact that we've always been here as a community: As it is, both the main PPC archives that a lot of people find their way to the PPC community through direct to this board and there is no way to change that link.
Who would manage the account? Make it several people. That way, if one of them vanished, the others could take over, and appoint a new cabal member if needed.
For those of us who are not underage, paying for it is easy enough; PayPal is everywhere. I'll pledge twenty bucks towards the funding, and my services in setting up the forums as well.
For those who are underage, why not the truth? "Some friends and I are setting up a website for our writing and stuff, and we're each pitching in five bucks to pay for it." If that doesn't work, you go down to the 7-Eleven, buy a money order, and snail it off to whoever's paying for the website.
Regarding the links, I take it that both the PPC archives in question are abandoned, then? Disappointing to know. :( That's a good argument in favor of having a full-fledged site that several people have admin access to, by the way. Anyway, if the links point here, the simple solution is to leave a link here pointing to the new website at plotprotectors.org (or whatever). People will follow it, don't worry; fans will find anything. (oh, and someone really ought to update the front page here; it's been like five years since any new news was posted)
By the way, the "wait until the posts drop off the page" doesn't work; they're there for all eternity. Check this link for a random example -- I googled for a post from a few pages back, and there's the page. So we have all the negatives of persistence without the positives, like being able to easily find something in an old thread.
Again, I'm not trying to browbeat people into agreeing with me. Just addressing the technical objections.
As to whether online activity and real-life identities are going to be more or less separate, that's a whole other can of worms. Certainly one side of the political spectrum is trying very hard to restrict freedom of speech all they can, and outlaw anonymity (except, of course, for the State and its operatives) along with it, and the other side wants to make everything politically correct "for the chidren." But there's a counter-push by privacy advocates to prohibit tracking and data-mining of our online activities, and that seems to be picking up momentum. Speaking of our underage posters, it may well be a US federal crime to have their IP's visible here; the law is a bit vague and very weird about that. So it's not quite as cut and dried as it looks.
Just out of curiousity, by the way, who is the administrator of this board? It seems like there are a lot of options that aren't being used.
Anyway, I'll put twenty bucks and my forum setup skills where my mouth is, if people decide to go that way.
Oh, as for the butthurt fanbrats, having them posting revenge reviews for my fanfic would be majorly annoying. I've never said anything online that I wouldn't tell the person in question to their face, nor that I wouldn't admit to on national television (a good rule for not having things come back to haunt you, like some politicians have had), but I'd really rather not have my fanfic, and my other activities, cluttered up by whiny children.
I think one of the things that has made the PPC what it is is the utter lack of a ruling cabal. We have no leaders, no authority, and no real politics, beyond voting in permission givers. We are a creative anarchy here, and that's definitely part of what the PPC is. While we've had to deal with problems in the past with more creative ways than simply banning and being done with it, I think it makes us stronger. I've seen board politics on more conventional forums get very ugly, and I really don't want that to happen to the PPC.
Now, if we were to get a new website, and keep the current forum structure intact, what could we do to reduce politics? (This question is for everyone, by the way - I'm not challenging you for an answer, Wandering Critic, I want to know what people think, and this is a convenient spot to put it.)
(And don't worry about coming across as pushy, conversation is a good thing. Going out, making a website on your own, and then posting demanding we all switch would be pushy. This is good conversation.)
Well, having been through at least my share of forum politics, I've formed a few hypotheses about that particular problem. The most important is that the cause of forum politics is not the forum itself, but the innate politics in the organization that populates the forums.
Take Usenet as an example, back in the golden age before the Eternal September. Unmoderated newsgroups were about as much of a free-for-all as has ever existed. Some of them were nightmares of flaming, sniping, infighting, and general asshattery. Others were some of the most civilized discussion groups I've ever seen. Since they all had the same structure, or rather lack thereof, the only significant difference was the population. The same is true of Web forums. For example, at various times, I've been a mod or admin in a number of online game forums. Those whose populations consisted of people who were big on in-game drama brought it to the boards, and there was more than enough forum drama to last a lifetime. Others, whose populations consisted of people who basically liked each other and weren't trying to be jerks (my former WoW guild, for instance) had no forum drama at all; there was a general agreement on how to go about things, so that's how it got done.
The way to reduce politics, I think, is simply to make it useless. What would be the point of politics on a PPC forum anyway? Make those decisions that need to be made -- should we add a new forum section for legendary badfic nominations? -- by consensus. Forum mods could be appointed by the same mechanism as PG's are. Or we could do entirely without mods, for that matter, and just deal with troublemakers the same as we do now. Or something in between, where there's a mod or two to take care of spam, but anything by a real user is left alone. Look around you: is there any problem with politics now? Changing whether we have an EDIT button and organized sections won't change people's attitudes, or make us all into different people.
I was using the term "cabal" jokingly. Whoever would maintain the website and hosting, and being root admin of the forum, wouldn't have any more of a voice than anyone else. I hope we, as a group, would be able to choose people who wouldn't want to expand that role to anything more than keeping things running and implementing any changes, like a new section, that the group consensus called for. Having a member of a group who takes on a job that needs to be done (like keeping a website paid-for) doesn't diminish the anarchy as long as their role is understood to be akin to that of groundskeeper rather than owner: a duty and a service, not a position of authority.
In other words, go along just the same as the PPC has always done, except that a couple of trusted people handle the technical stuff on behalf of the group. A better forum won't cause political drama to spontaneously generate any more than moving some politics-riddled forum to a system like this would cause it to go away. It's the people, not the medium.
Oh, and just so the massive cash flow doesn't cause drama of its own: Anyone who contributes five bucks during the annual fund drive gets listed on the forum, so the bill-payer (who would obviously have to be a Money Plant!) never gets accused of collecting a few extra contributions than are needed and splurging on a double-cheese pizza.
The PPC is set up in such a way that no one is really in charge. The permission givers are here so that way there's at least /some/ control over the shared universe. They're permission givers because the community as a whole trusts them to know what the community is about and to help with newbies also wanting to PPC, not be figures of authority. Having a website would end up doing something like that. There's no real hierarchy here except for the ones people put in their minds.
As to links, Cam still maintains her website which still hosts the original series after it was kicked off of FF.net, but P@L, whose site has the link to this board, has been AWOL from fandom for a few years now, at least. (Thus why the front page hasn't been upated.)
The Board only keeps a limited number of posts in the provided archive; and will only stay up for a limited amount of time. If there were no posts on it in, I can't remember which, either three or six months, then the board would be deleted, simple as that. So yes, while your link is evidence of there being an archive, it's a very small archive- right now going back to only mid June- and every new topic on the front page pushes an old topic off the last page and into internet oblivion.
The person who set this board up I believe is P@L, who as I mentioned earlier has been AWOL for several years. The only thing keeping this board in existence is the activity of
its members.
And yes, I agree, revenge reviews are annoying.
And with a real forum, there would be an EDIT button so I could fix my freaking typos!!!
The benefits of being in a university hall, huh?
... but I'm rather trusting. On the other hand, I'd have no objection at all to creating a new forum for ourselves with a different program/server.
...and I also think no-one has ever really given it that much thought. Either we're all too preoccupied or we're too trusting :P
A simple whois won't do very much.
And you're really worried about the security/privacy issue, WC, you could just drop off the board for a few weeks or so until all your posts are gone and then post using a proxy.
We don't usually pay them much attention. I think the last time anyone noticed them was when a troll had the same IP address as one of the Boarders. Turned out they were both using the same school computer.
I think thought has been given, but the Board has worked well for a very long time, so the thought hasn't been very serious.
The Board has been showing the IP addresses of the poster for at least a year (I say at least a year since that's about how long I've been posting here). From what I know, none of us can shut it off, my guess is that that is a setting that an administrator for the board would need to do if it is possible, but I think it has been years since the person who set up the board (P@L, if I'm thinking right) has had a presence here.
From what I know, looking at archived pages from the Way Back Machine as well as various links and pages from the LJ community, there have been a few times where the Board has given serious consideration to switching to a different venue, at least once due to a serious trolling problem, but despite that, this particular sort of forum has been stuck with for at least five years.
And that's about as much as I know.