What's the word on identity hunts?

[Apos]

Recently there was a bit of a hubbub about a thread in which a poster asked others to see if they could figure out who he was just by the information in his user profile. An admin (I forget which) strongly came down on the user for encouraging "hacking" though others protested that it was instead a harmless form of cracking.

Whatever the outcome of that issue, it makes me wary about posting something a little related in MPSIMS, though it doesn't involve either user profiles or ips or whatever)

Basically, I was wondering if it would be okay to post something like this:

"I'm comfortable with people knowing who I am in real life (no one of consequence), so I wanted to make it into a sort of game out of figuring it out. I'll post one or more true but vague statements about myself, and your job will be to tell me both who I am and exactly how you were able to deduce it from the information I've given (and only that information: using info from my user profile, or any direct IP/email tracking is not only cheating, but possibly even frowned upon by board rules). As time goes on, I'll post more statements to help narrow things down.

The facts would be things such as "On May 5th, 2002 I was sitting two rows behind Clint Eastwood at a certain special function." (then posters would have to figure out where Eastwood was that day, and thus where I was, thus narrowing things down quite a bit if they can deduce other information from that fact)

Anyway, would something like this be problematic?

[Ringo]

I speak for no one but myself, but I'll bet the admins and mods will discourage anything that smacks of bringing a poster's true identity on to the board.

[donkeyoatey]

Wouldn't that apply to a poster revealing another poster's identity, Ringo ? There are several posters here who say their usernames are their RL names.
I don't recall that, Apos, but there was a thread deleted a while ago where Q.E.D. posted his board cookie and dared someone to get anything useful from it. A poster then posted 2 or 3 times as Q.E.D., having been able to get his password from the cookie.

[Arnold Winkelried]

I've seen too many times people asking us "could you please delete these posts of mine? Some people I know are signing up to the board and I don't want them to know certain things about me" to look forward to a "guess my identity" game.

Don't do it.

[Achernar]

Is there any general obligation on posters to keep their identity a secret? What if, say, a poster's real-life name is displayed prominently in the title of his linked webpage? Would that be a problem?

[Ringo]

I thought Arnold might feel that way about it..

Repeating what I've said several times, I think you need to remember two things as you post here:

1.) This is a public message board - as much fun as we all seem to have here, you really shouldn't post anything that you couldn't stand surfacing in your off-board life; it's likely to stay there, accessible to anyone, for a long time, and

2.) Your anonymity ain't - once you've been on this board a while, you've likely dropped enough personal info that any determined investigator could establish your identity. Many on this board know my true identity, and a lot more that's never going to appear here. But you don't want to make it easy for random nimrods to cause you grief.

[Arnold Winkelried]

Achernar - I wouldn't say it's wise, but it's off-board so I won't say that it's against the rules.

[Achernar]

...and what about on-board stuff? What's the rule there? Here's what I got from the Registration Agreement: "Please do not post personal revelations or other information that may come back to haunt you. In particular, do not post your home telephone number or address." Is that all there is regarding rules? You and I clearly have a different concept of what's good sense regarding revealing your identity online. If it would upset the administrators for me to post my name and home city, or my work phone, or my email address, or anything like that, I think it should be made part of the rules. I don't want to upset anyone unintentionally.

[Achernar]

...or, rather, you don't have to make it part of the rules, but maybe you could just fill me in in this thread. Thanks.

[Apos]

Gotcha. Again, I'm not particularly worried about anyone knowing anything about me, from what I've posted here or otherwise, but I can definately see how the practice could encourage other people to do the same WITHOUT thinking it through.

[C K Dexter Haven]

Exactly, Apos.