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Right. When you come online, your ISP gives you an IP address - IP being internet protocol. This is a unique identifier assigned to you, normally for the length of your session online, but sometimes its stable over time. Each ISP has a range of IP addresses that it is able to allocate to its customers.
Every single thing you do online basically involves that IP address. Every time you request a web page, image, file to be downloaded to your computer, you send your current IP address, time, the browser you are using etc. etc. etc. to the server with the file on it. This is inbuilt to the architecture of the internet and has been since its beginnings...
NOW - for the most part there is no way of associating an IP address with a person, because each time you go online you might get assigned a different one by your ISP. But you can work on the principle that an individual person will - for the most part - use the same IP range, because that's all that's available to their ISP. You can easily identify the ISP someone uses if you know their IP address when they've posted, and Barbelith records IP addresses for precisely this reason (just like almost all other community sites) - so that if you have significant problems with abuse/spamming/denial-of-service-attacks etc you can contact ISPs directly and get them to act. The ISP themselves will have details about which IP address was assigned to which account-holder at any given moment - this is information that they use to combat spammers. They are very uncomfortable (quiet rightly) about giving that information out - recognising that being able to associate an IP address directly with a credit card and a person's name and address could be profoundly worrying if in the hands of marketeers or governments...
On Barbelith, on several occasions, we've been forced to block whole IP ranges in order to stop the board disintegrating under attacks from trolls (where attack is defined even as simply as a recurrent and unwelcome reassertion of presence that tends to derail the communities attempts at normal operation).
So - basically what happens is this - when there is a notable problem with a troll on Barbelith (and the number of trolls is very low, although they may have a number of suits and are very vocal with them) - I look up their IP address to find out which ISP they're connecting with. I then to a search to find out if any other user names have posted with the same IP address recently - which normally means that they're the same real-life user connecting under different names. Then I check the IP range and see how many users have connected via that range. If that figure seems relatively low, then I block that ISP from Barbelith completely.
In principle this means that no one from that ISP can ever post on Barbelith again (until I relax that restriction), but in practice Cal and I built in a back-door which means that we can allow individual users access to the board even if their IP address is in the problematic range. At the moment it's up to me to choose who gets that approval or not - and I use several criteria which are: has the user posted regularly beforehand (if so and they're not a troll, then they get access), if they have not posted regularly then they can't be using a free e-mail address, because these can so easily be gotten hold of, and are ideal for protecting your privacy. Often I ask people if they have an academic institution e-mail address or a work e-mail address that they'd be prepared to provide instead. If they can do that, and confirm their membership in an appropriate way, then they can get entry even if they haven't posted much before. These criteria are revised on the fly every so often depending on whether or not a problem emerges...
The recent problems have been the result of a particularly difficult user whose IP range I banned without realising the impact it would have on the rest of the board's users on the East Coast of the States... Apologies to everyone - I've now taken off the restriction and instituted a 'no new users' policy until we can fix this issue more appropriately... |
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