Hey, what’s up with this:
(from SDMB main page)
That’s not my name. Is this because JayLa and I work at the same company, and come through the same proxy server? This is why I get queasy when a web site thinks it knows who I am, even without me telling it. I know I’m not the only one using this computer/subnet/NATpool/proxy.
It sounds like JayLa was using that comp. earlier and didn’t log off. You should let him/her know about it as they’re leaving themselves open to anybody who uses that comp. being able to post any kind of crap in their name.
I can assure you that that’s not the case, unless galt was sitting in my lap and I didn’t notice it. 
I log onto SDMB either from one of my office computers - and I don’t share an office - or from my home computer. Not only that, but at 9:14 CT I was ON that computer.
galt: do we work at the same company?
The board can get “last visit” information from an IP address, if there’s no cookies, but it should be getting the name from the cookies. Does your company have any public computer rooms, beyond individual offices, which you might both have used?
As an example, if I log off and view the page, it says, "Welcome, guest. Your last visit was " and the time of my last visit from that computer. If I’m logged in, it says "Welcome, Chronos. Your last visit was " and the time of my last login, from anywhere.
I don’t even know if we do work at the same company, although the place I work at is certainly not small enough where I’d know everyone who works there.
However, I do know that the only computers at work from which I access SDMB are the ones in my office, and I would have noticed if someone was in my office using them.
At any rate, I’ll drop an email to TubaDiva about it.
Maybe your company has a web cache server that also caches cookies, is that possible?
The name isn’t in the cookie any more. That was UBB. vB just has the user ID #. So that’s a lot easier to get corrupted (say a simple disk read error) and still be rendered as within range (not sure about vB, but lots of numerical systems will “wrap around” oversize numbers to land randomly elsewhere.
Your guess is most likely correct; the IP numbers match and resolve to a large company with many connections to the Net, I am sure.
That being said, your log-ins should be entirely separate and you should not have seen that message. Something’s wrong. You may have just discovered another unforeseen bug in vB, which is not surprising, it’s still fairly new software.
Let me kick this over to our techs for a look-see, perhaps they’ll have some information on the matter.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
To answer some people’s hypotheses:
No, we cannot possibly have used the same computers. The computer I use was at my desk, which is in a locked lab, and my console gets auto-locked by the cybex switch on a 5 minute timeout. JayLa would have to be pretty sneaky to have been using my computer. 
The IP address should not be used, since cookies are definitely enabled on my machine. When I saw the Welcome message for JayLa, I clicked on “profile”, and I was prompted with the login screen, and my correct name was in the username field. That means that the value in the field either came from a cookie (i.e. javascript looked up the value client-side and inserted it in the field) or it was sent as part of the html in the form, meaning that the server figured out who I really was in the 10 seconds since I saw the welcome message.
I bet it’s a bug. If SDMB were my bank, I’d be seriously reconsidering where I keep my money. As it is, I’m kinda glad: if I say something really stupid, I’ll just claim it was a mixup and that JayLa really said it.
Given the nature of the web, it’s an amazingly bad idea to use IP addresses of clients for any kind of identification purposes. Even ignoring NAT and proxy servers, lots of machines are multi-user. Hell, I have machines in my lab where multiple different users run web browsers at the same time. SDMB would probably red flag that in no time.
JayLa: maybe we do work at the same company…do you use ITGPROXY too?
This may sound lo-tech, but why don’t you just email her at
The email address for JayLa is jessicala37@hotmail.com ?
This is her profile:
Location: Seattle area, Washington, USA
Occupation: Software tester
And don’t play “you tell me first”. Just say “I work for xyz corp, logging in via Kramer.net. How about you?”
And, fascinating as it is to you, don’t feel we need to be told either way.
Well, I would certainly stop using a bank if I found out that they were using a software package that only costs $300 or whatever. Good enough for a message board, but with my money I want real security. It would suck to lose all $12 I have.
Oh, and Pit, maybe some of us do want to be told.
Er, huh? True, we don’t need to know where and for whom galt and JayLa work, but I for one very much want to know if the issue raised is a bug, if it’s replicable, and what a solution might be.
Before y’all start inviting one another outside to go to Fist City, hold on, okay?
I did refer this to the techs, let’s see if they come up with anything on this.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
The point of this thread is not to find out whether JayLa and I work at the same company…it’s to figure out what happened on the main page. My one-line note to JayLa was what is commonly referred to as an “aside”, and is idle curiosity. So don’t flame me for not using the most efficient method of inquiry.
Thanks for your concern, and my apologies for allowing any part of my post to be less than “fascinating” to you.
This is the kind of crap we in customer service get all the time.
“Fix this problem, it must be a bug!”
“Are you sure that some one else isn’t sharing your computer?”
“How dare you intrude on my private life! Just fix the bug!”
…
tempus fugit
…
“We’re sorry, Sir, we wasted a week researching your petty whine, only because you brought it up 4 times, but couldn’t find anything.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have bothered. It turned out to be my wife.” And no Thank You.
You want everyone else to jump around, but you won’t send one lousy one-line email? :wally
The simplist explanation is usually the right one.
galt and JayLa are the same person, who wants someone to say there’s a system flaw to cover up a posting that was made under the wrong name.
TubaDiva: since I didn’t answer directly before, and it may be helpful to the techs, galt and I are going through the same proxy server. There’s at least one other person I know of who posts here now and then who might be going through that server too.
Then I take back what I said before.
With this new info, the most likely thing is that it’s a one-time fluke at the shared resource, and won’t be repeatable by vB testers.
Where the heck did these statements come from?
What say y’all just chill out and let the Admins and Tech Gurus take care of things, kay?
Andros, you have to read between the lines like these other folks if you want to see the secret coded messages in my original post.
“Hey, what’s up with this?” really translates to “I demand that this problem be fixed immediately, and furthermore, it’s probably user error, but I refuse to admit it.” And here you thought I was expressing mere curiosity.
Furthermore, there is a conspiracy between JayLa and myself to waste the time of the Administrators, which we have cleverly covered up by pointing it out to everyone. Since nobody involved in such a conspiracy would want to call attention to it, we are throwing you off our trails by bringing it up as a topic of conversation. Muhahaha.
Gnarly Narly Dude, barstow, and The Pit and The Pendulum could give you a lesson or two about spotting bad guys. They’ve got me pegged.