http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe...eut/index.html

<font color=skyblue>Two people get into an argument in an online chat forum and then one of them decides to hunt down and hurt the other, bringing weapons with him to the guy's house and confronts him (luckily not killing him).

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See, now that is just brilliant!! If more people got hunted down and smacked, less people would cause problems in chat rooms and on message boards. People shouldn't say anything online that they wouldn't say if they were in the same room with the person they are talking to. It's just good manners.

<font color=skyblue>Despite better judgement, I actually have to agree with you for the fact that too many forum-visitors feel the safety of anonymity and will say (or do) things that they'd never do in front of a real person. The false sense of safety is the issue here, for there really is no safety. One way or another, a person can be found.</font>

Amen brother. Have you ever tried a nifty little program called "neo trace"? It tracks an IP address as far back as it can to the source, i.e. your house!! I dont know if you mods can see all of our IP's, but if you can download neo trace and try it out. I use it with people who post annon on my livejournal. Sometimes I get their street address, most times just their neighborhood. It is funny how people stop talking junk when you call them by their first name and tell them their home address from 1500 miles away.

<font color=skyblue>In the past, we have had people that caused so much trouble on our forums that Ziroc had need to trace them down, and then sent them an e-mail telling them that he'd easily tracked them down and was reporting them to their ISPs...and one guy that had posted a link to a virus got a message from Ziroc informing him that Z's lawyers would be giving him a call at his mom's house if any IWer's PC was damaged because of his malicious post. We also use the IPs to make sure that a banned user does not come back under a different name to cause trouble. Sometimes to make sure we got them, Ziroc's been known to block whole countries before!

Yes, the internet tells us everything we need to know, then a Google Earth tells us how to get there.

Its quite fun, being on this side of things...</font>

[ 11-17-2006, 11:17 PM: Message edited by: Larry_OHF ]