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.

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.

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.