Monday, July 21, 2008

Anonymous comments - getting outed in public

Travolution has suffered from the dreaded anonymous commenters on a number of occasions.

But there has been an interesting exchange in recent days on OpenParenthesis which followed a post about importing travel itinerary content onto Dopplr.

It was a reasonably dry article until 'Thomas' posted "I don't find Dopplr very useful" into the comments section.

'Thomas', it turns out, is an employee of TripIt.com - which pioneered the email upload system for travel planning networks.

Anyway, John Eckman, who writes OpenParenthesis, decided to out 'thomas' and within three and half hours got a gushing apology from Scott Hintz, one of Tripit's co-founders.

Our policy here, for what it's worth, is that we have kept comment moderation off for about 12 months or so now. We normally find out, in the same way as most do (via DNS and IP addresses), who anonymous commenters are and will publish the name of their organisation if needs be.

More on Musings.

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some berk from another leading search engine did that once in some heated debate about one of their new releases - very, very dangerous!

Travolution Blogger said...

Mel:

And what happened?

Anonymous said...

he got found out because of his IP address and outed....

Travolution Blogger said...

Mel:

did the blogosphere berate him?

[can you post a link here for us to read?]

Anonymous said...

This is hilarious, and I’ve had instances on Travel Rants where the same person has posted a response, different names, but exact same IP address.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything juicy as a travel company, otherwise I’d have named and shamed for sure. Maybe this is why travel companies are afraid of blogs and Bloggers, what do you reckon Kev?

Travolution Blogger said...

Darren: i've left a length response on that post of yours today which explores this issue.

Anonymous said...

that's the end for me then!

Travolution Blogger said...

Anonymous: and we know who you are!

Anonymous said...
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Travolution Blogger said...

Anonymous: SPAM!!

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...
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Travolution Blogger said...

Anonymous x2: Anot sure what - if any - relevancy your comment has to the post.