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- I know of someone who gets online, mostly to use chat rooms. They have a free online e-mail account and I know their real-life nicknames; it’s likely their screenname is a variation. - I can send e-mail out to the different “guesses” and invalid addresses will come back as such, but I don’t know if the person I am seeking will answer and the nature of hotmail-type accounts is that the account may be abandoned (ie-inactive, but still valid), so many sent items may be valid addresses, but they still may not get returned. Is there any practical way to search through chatroom screennames, without going to each individual chatroom? - MC
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Depending. On IRC, you have two options available to you. You can either use /whois on whatever name variant you think they may be using and see what’s returned, or else you can just use /who and watch your screen flood as everyone on that network is listed on your screen.
Of course, there’s no telling if the Friend031 is the same Friend031 you’re looking for.
“I guess one person can make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
It’s a needle in a virtual haystack. Trying to find someone on IRC can be a mess, since there’s many, many different IRC networks. In addition to the abformentioned /whois command and the /who command (which won’t work if user is +i, and that’s now the default in mIRC, so that command is pretty useless). Not only that, but if the user isn’t on at that exact moment, you won’t find him. There is a /whowas command, but that only works for a limited amount of time.
If you’re on a network that allows nickname registration, try the command “/msg nickserv info username” This command may vary from network to network, so try the command “/msg nickserv help” for more info. From this command you can get the user’s DNS address, which may or may not provide a clue as to who the user is. Sometimes the user’s city is contained within the address, sometimes not. And sometimes the city in the address is only that of a semi-local router the user is going through; the city may be a couple hundred miles from the user’s locale.
Good luck in your search. You’re gonna need it.
If you know the email address some of those instant messager type things let you know if they are online at the time you are. If you remember when they were online you can try that time span.