Party Vibe

TBH I don’t think there’s a sufficient threat here at the moment; and it doesn’t stop people using “throwaway” user IDs (psy-forum was always registration only) – idiots can still register; and as long as I can see the IPs I can often work out where someone is posting from (at least the country, and in some cases even the city they are in).

Unless you know otherwise, I’ve only had to delete one anon post threatening a user in the last 6 months – the chap threatening DJ Fattmann (who was based near to his area…) and (at least on the drugs forum) the facility for anon posting gives people an extra perception of privacy.

OTOH many people may no longer trust anon posts about parties, due to fake party postings on SJ……

At this time I wouldn’t suggest banning anon posting – however if more people abuse it and should it become a trade off between banning anon posting and banning IPs (with attendant risk of collateral damage) then we would have to reluctantly go to registered users only.

but as i’m not involved in the technical side at all i wouldn’t know of any ‘attacks’ of that nature

should that read bored abuse

aye with 90% of message board abuse, there’s nothing technical or intelligent about what they are doing; its simply someone logging out trying to slag off someone else whilst using anon posting or a fake ID to conceal their identity.

There thankfully just isn’t that problem at the moment on partyvibe at the moment and i hope it stays that way.

the other 10% would be using an automated process to send repeated messages [something once used on SJ to fill people’s IM boxes], or to register lots of users (our new software has a system in place to prevent this).TBH I find it quite sad that people with programming knowledge actually put their minds towards designing things like this (ditto with spam and worms)

I’ve got a couple of people trolling my forum and it would b interesting to know if they are local (which means people we possibly know and have a grudge) or out of the area (which will probably mean someone who has found the board somehow and is trying to wind us up)

In some cases it only gets you as much info as which country they may be in-some ISPs give more info away than others when naming the gateway computers through which their users access the internet

When you get the IP address run a traceroute. On windows go to your command prompt and type tracert a.b.c.d where a.b.c.d is the IP address.

All sorts of IP addresses and hostnames will appear on the screen.

Sometimes you will get “trace complete” and a hostname and address, or you will see * * * appear repeatedly which means you have hit a firewall at the trolls ISPs end. In that case the hostname before it is the clue (which ISP they are running from)

here’s the end of one for Busy Bee.

10 vlan128-p0001-synetrix.synetrix.co.uk (217.65.146.129) 7.909 ms 8.290 ms 7.791 ms
11 fe8-1-p0008-stafford.synetrix.co.uk (217.65.147.14) 8.173 ms 7.996 ms 8.485 ms
12 fe3-0-pe0025-staffordlea.synetrix.co.uk (217.65.147.38) 9.225 ms 8.442 ms 9.840 ms
13 * * *
14 * * *
15 * * *

sometimes its a dead giveaway if you have a bit of geographical knowledge – NTL for instance name all their servers with an abbreviated regional tag. In other cases you may only get an ISP name, and have to do some detective work (add [url=”http://www.*”%5Dwww.*%5B/url%5D) to the front of the ISP name and you usually get their corporate sales website! ISPs for large public and private sector clients also often brag about their sales on this site.

In the above case (as well as the giveaway name at code 12) a simple check of the website of synetrix.co.uk shows that Staffordshire LEA are one of their major clients – this is how I worked out that “buzy bee” was probably a schoolkid in the midlands.

Even if you just get an ISP address you will find a lot of ISPs have their customer bases concentrated round certain areas

if its someones work address then sometimes the company name is in the hostname. That’s why its a very bad idea to troll from a work connection – there are boards where the admins would go straight to that companys IT dept if there was disruption!

NB: These address can be spoofed so this (like any kind of investigative work) is not 100% foolproof- but most trolls are not master hackers…