Yup, most people are not aware that if you say something REALLY naughty on one of these boards, it is NOT impossible to track you down.
When you visit a website (especially forums like this one), your Internet Protocol (IP) address is most likely recorded along with the exact time you browsed the site. Your IP is a number on your computer that distinguishes your computer from others on the Internet. For most ISPs, this number constantly changes on your computer.
With your IP and traffic time, a webmaster can find out who your Internet Service Provider (Bellsouth, AOL, etc.) is by running a Traceroute or Whois lookup which can be done on the Internet for free. If your IP is static, your ISP will know exactly who you are and can lookup your account information. If your IP is dynamic (like most of us) they can look up which of their customers was on that IP at the time the site was hit.
I know all of this because I run a website myself and I record IPs for it. Why do I record them? Because recording them tells me what kind of traffic my site has and I can't tell which visitors are people and which ones are search engine crawlers without recording the IPs.
In short, you gotta behave on these websites because you are not as anonymous as you may think you are.
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