On Saturday 19 July 2003 04:51 am, Gustaf Neumann wrote: > On Saturday 19 July 2003 06:32, you wrote: > > > i wonder that this discussion was not coming up earlier... > > > > Probably because using IP address in most cases is a bad idea and there > > are probably better ways of tracking people (such as unique persistent > > cookies). > > using the IP address as a means to track people is certainly a bad > idea. a common usage in OpenACS is for documentation purposes.
Of course we don't use the IP for session tracking or user identification, we use cookies. However knowing the IP that's generated content can be useful for blocking purposes. When I was active moderating photo.net a few years back we had one particularly obnoxious miscreant posting from a fixed IP during the day, apparently from work. We didn't block him but we did make his contributions invisible to all but himself. I know craig's list uses IP blocking to lock out certain people. Obviously this is imperfect as many people get their IP from large dial-up pools etc but when someone chooses to spam or vandalize a website that includes bulletin boards and the like the site admin needs every tool possible to cope. -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
