I continue to believe that anonymity is one of the chief curses of the internet--and that one of the primary ways to reduce the temptation to sin on the internet is for us to freely acknowledge our full names wherever we comment or write.
Along with this I've come to recognize certain patterns of anonymity in our blog's log files--patterns that often reveal bottom-feeder internet ethics.
I suspect most casual users of the internet aren't aware how many personally revealing facts are databased each time they go to an internet site. For instance, web servers record the IP address and domain name of all guest PCs. Take that adddress here and you will sometimes learn a great deal about who is frequenting your site. At the very least, you'll usually have an idea of the city they live in and the ISP they use to access the internet.
Perhaps the slimiest indicator in the average weblog is the IP address that leads to a university in Stuttgart (or some other former eastern-bloc city). This is the mark of a user cloaking his online activity by employing anonymizer tactics--usually a proxy server disguising the originating IP address. Our experience has been that those who do this tend to engage in internet conduct so slimy that they've learned to cover their tracks. And though the use of an anonymizer is more frequently tied to porn and warez consumption than blog commenting, when someone posts from a cloaked address they almost invariably possess the ethics of a snake. This is a tactic we've seen used by--among others--advocates of the repugnant drivel known as "kinism."
The next most slimy tactic is the false flag attack--commenting under a false name, or sometimes under another's real name. How can we know when names are false? Looking the name up in a phone book or on Google helps at times. So does emailing and finding the provided email address a fake. But quite often, when an attack rolls in that sounds like someone we've heard from before, doing a search for past comments from the same IP address tells the story. It's amazing, for instance, how many uniquely-named individuals writing from the same department of the same ClearChannel radio station have attacked us for a lack of respect for women.
Then there is the legion of cowardly lions who attack anonymously.
Finally, there are those who shoot from the shadows. Whenever we write on certain topics we can be certain our referrer logs will show incoming links from certain private forums and bulletin boards. It's clear from the points of entry what topics they're interested in. It's also clear from the negative comments they leave that the originating link was a negative post. Frankly, when Reformed pastors cloak their discussions in such anonymity it makes one wonder what kind of childishness they're concealing.
There really is no place on the internet for men (and I'm not speaking generically at this point) of God walking about anonymously. Male internet anonymity is almost always tied to some form of sin. This is so even when we say that making our names known might cost us our jobs. Yes, it may, but that's what faith is all about, brothers.
