can other bloggers see who I am when I visit?
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This is not intended to sound as paranoid as it does – just wondering if most blogs (including non-wordpress blogs) feature the ability to track and identify their visitors, rather than simply dealing in anon stats? worth knowing … thanks!
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Yes, they do. It’s easy and there are plenty of free services that will do it. Here at Wp.com, actually, we have less ability to track people, because we can’t see the specific IPs that visit our blog without signing up for external services that track hits.
But the fact is that most bloggers don’t bother checking. Once your’e getting more than a handful of hits, you’ve got to be pretty obsessive to run every IP through Neotrace.
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Well, let me clarify: you can track a visitor on your site. You can’t track him across the universe once he clicks away from your site without installing spyware. Ad-driven sites commonly do this, but most blogs themselves don’t (the ad companies keep the info!).
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“to track and identify their visitors”
What do you mean?
If I comment on your blog you will see my IP. Run a check on that and it will resolve to Rochdale in the UK. I live nowhere near Rochdale – that’s my ISP.
If you had a blog on your own domain with all the tracking tools you would still only get to Rochdale. You’d know all about my browser, some information about my operating system, where I had come from, what pages I looked at etc but for identifying information? No.
Make sure comment notify emails are on in the blog (Options > Discussion) and make a comment. The email you get has a line with your IP. Click that and see if you can find you.
Places like http://dnsstuff.com offer IP information but it still only narrows things down. It does not say “It’s luc8 at No.15 who just looked”. -
Yes, but you can correlate things. Like, if I got an email from you I could compare it with the IP on my site and tell who had checked the site.
Also: I ran my own IP and it came up with my proper name. That’s rare, but it does happen.
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@raincoaster – that IP is rare indeed.
It’s a fair amount of work to correlate things though, you’d need a fairly good reason and to do that for everyone would be a daft amount of work.
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True enough. Daft people, however, are in plentiful supply, alas, particularly around Internet drama, which is where I got my battlescars.
If someone is really worried, they can use anonymizers and proxies to hide behind. Actually, AOL is damn near impenetrable.
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Moss Bridge Road, cute name.
I’m not showing Rain’s name on her ip address:
S01060004e2a7f1b7.vc.shawcable.net
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Naw, new connection.
At one time, if you put “Internet drama” into the yahoo search engine, my blog came up third. Ah, good times, good times.
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