The sort-of hidden way to get the IPs of Tropers

I just discovered it, on a article history page. What's the point of putting it there and hiding it as such?

Dumbo

This is concerning.

The term "Great Man" is disturbingly interchangeable with "mass murderer" in history books.

The IPs were actually in plain sight before. I think Fast Eddie doesn't want to completely remove them but I don't remember why.

edited 27th Sep '10 5:58:06 PM by Glowsquid

Not everybody logs in all the time to edit an article, so if you want to see all edits of a certain troper, you can search for his IP instead.

But why would this be concerning?

edited 28th Sep '10 2:41:59 AM by eX

This has been the case for quite some time. There was a large thread about it that was forgotten.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

@eX - Fear of hacking/cracking.

Half-Life: Dual Nature, a crossover story of reasonably sized proportions.

Unless you are always using an un-NAT-ed, unfirewalled, always-on connection on a Windows machine, that shouldn't be much of a concern.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

Ah, sorry, I searched in a silly way...so, this is meant to be a secret to people who don't visit the forums?

Dumbo

It's hardly a secret. It's hidden in a cursory way, but Eddie doesn't seem to share some people's paranoia about having your IP be discoverable. Is there any serious person who doesn't run a firewall?

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

OK....so having it be invisible is just a way to provide a false little layer of security for the paranoid?

Dumbo

No, the paranoid can figure out how to be paranoid without anyone's help. It's to provide a false sense of security for the casual troper who doesn't bother highlighting hidden text on a page.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Technically there is no reason for IP addresses to be made public. If anything, I and any student I train would consider it grievious violations of the most basic tenens of P 3 P and social contract — after all, if Fast Eddie wants the numbers for examination or historical purposes, well, that's what server logs were made for.

Having them vievable in produced content however has the somewhat sane advantage of making people aware that "we are watching you so behave well". Not that it has too much of an effect. It sucks for the paranoid, even the sane ones, since you can't edit TV Tropes from most proxies, not even when registered with your handle, but I consider that a design fault similar to ptitles only made into feature what with the amounts of Natter some pages attract.

A practical solution would be having the IP addresses only viewable for registered handles which meet certain criteria (let's say having edited the same page). As said above, there is no reason why you want to expose your clientèle to the whole world when you only want the numbers for accountability purposes.

EDIT3d4fixingtropes... why is Horrible/Software missing? there were so many important things there...

edited 28th Sep '10 6:23:38 AM by SilentReverence

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

The inability to edit from proxies is because of some pernicious and persistent trolls we've acquired over the years.

We discussed having IPs for known tropers only visible to people with mod privileges. I believe Eddie had a good reason for not implementing this but I don't recall it offhand.

Anyway, who the hell cares? People are so privacy-paranoid these days that they sweat the minor stuff while completely ignoring the real threats. If you're that concerned about it, don't edit the wiki. Hell, stay off the Internet.

edited 28th Sep '10 6:34:16 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I think the reason given was that we do get useful alerts to negative activity from regular Tropers using the displayed IPs.

(As for Horrible/Software, there's already another wiki dedicated to software tropes.)

Do you highlight everything looking for secret messages?

Moderators aren't the only ones who spot attacks, and far fewer will be stopped unless people can detect ban evaders or the like using the same IP.

Anyone who really wants to hack you does not really need to see your IP publically to do so. Here, the safety of the wiki is more readily threatened by removing I Ps from edit histories than is the safety of editors ourselves.

Would you kill your best friend, can you save yourself?

Maybe we should go back to having the IPs in plain black text instead of sneaky white, so people know they're there and don't feel deceived when they discover it.

Heapers’ Hangout

Anyone who want to collect taxes from me, ad nag me or outright kill me does not really need to go to the Yellow Pages and check my home phone #(s) to do so. That doesn't mean that not putting up that level of information on public just because does not work as a practical extra barrier.

Anyway, given what I read above about "being used for good" only strengthens my position that something should be done to make such information accessible only to those who are intended to make that use from it — ie.: namehandled tropers. At the least.

Fanfic Recs orwellianretcon'd: cutlocked for committee or for Google?

But it's not only name-handled tropers who help out by reporting problem-makers. We've gotten useful alerts from non-handled contributors as well.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

The biggest security threat to the average forum user is that over time they give out enough information to be traceable by someone obsessive enough. IP address is only a tiny part of that, and not hugely useful; most of us are on ISP dynamic address pools anyway, and all you're going to get is a rough idea of location (down to the county, perhaps, or big city).

A brighter future for a darker age.

If they work Try a SOCKS proxy.

Who watches the watchmen?

We've shut down editing from most proxies due to vandalism.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

That information is a little dated. We tried blocking proxies, but it stabbed our traffic numbers in the neck. We now use methods that are more ... granular.

Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty

Pfft, traffic, whining about a little neck stabbing.

Fight smart, not fair.

Sorry, Eddie, I know you allow proxies to read the wiki, but I thought that actual editing was restricted. Secondhand information...

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"