[user104658]

Originally Posted by Nedusa

Not much chance of identity theft on this forum though. Nobody knows anybody or anything about anybody. We all have avatars and the only piece of real info anybody has is an IP address.

So I think we are all very comfortable on here secure in our anonymity.....

Ummmmmmm not that I want to make you feel less secure Nedusa, but it's very easy to obtain an IP address without mod / admin privileges.

You just upload a picture to webspace that you have administrator access to, send a PM to the person whose IP address you want with that picture in an [img] tag, then check the IP logs to see who has viewed that picture. If you only sent it to one person - then there will only be two IP addresses in those logs. Yours, and theirs.

For anyone who knows what they're doing after that point... it's relatively easy to identify an individual (or at least, a household) from "only" an IP address.