Chab Gassie

Some private detective was bragging today because he found out who made an anonymous comment on an internet forum and sued him. Now he reckons people can’t make anonymous, slanderous comments online anymore because they’ll get sued. I don’t think this is true, so I’m trying to work out how this guy found out who the anonymous guy was.

To legally find out who has made an anonymous comment you’ll need to do one of two things.

On this occassion the comment was made on a forum under a false name which has an account. So the detective could’ve sent a private message to the person who made the comment and asked them what their real name was. This could’ve worked if he posed as a hot woman or something of that sort. So maybe the person simply told the detective what their name is.

The second thing you could do is get their IP address and then track them through that. For those who aren’t technologically knowledgeable, when you visit any website, you’ll leave your IP address, which is a number that effectively says: ‘Hi! This is where I am!’. So maybe the detective posted a link to a site he’d set up on the forum as bait and the anonymous poster clicked through and gave the detective the IP address.

Or maybe the detective just hacked the crap out of some computers. I don’t know.

The lesson is, if you’re going to post retarded comments online, make sure you don’t tell anybody on the site your real name and don’t give out your IP address. Maybe it’s easier just to not make retarded comments online, but that’s not fun.