Comment username problem

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  johndilligent · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 3:57 pm

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  I’m not sure if I have all the facts here, because I know this guy and
  that he likes to take more anonymous routes to get where he’s going
  online. But I finally received my first comments — from him — and his
  comments were posted up under some kind of default (?) username
  (Greg Salmom) that he said was “picked for him”. He is not register-
  ed as a member of the community, but was coming in from “outside”,
  just to post a comment. When you move the mouse over his gravatar,
  you get a hovercard with the identifier: “fred 19”. I have always known
  him as “Fred”, so I’ll just assume he would have wanted to post his
  comment with some variation of that as a user name, which would’ve
  provided him instant recognition.

  Can anyone tell me what happened here? Not only am I curious, but
  I perceive it as a possible problem, as in my view commenters should
  be able to utilize either their username of choice or “anonymous”, at
  their discretion.

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  thesacredpath · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 7:08 pm

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  The only way I can think that this could happen was if they were on another computer where a comment had previously been made on a wordpress.COM blog under the name of Greg Salmom by someone else (a cookie would have been set on that computer). The thing is though that you can always override that name field and type in something else. There are no “default” usernames.

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  johndilligent · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 8:35 pm

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  Okay SP, thank you for your help on this.

  JD

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  thesacredpath · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 8:55 pm

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  You’re welcome. If you get anymore information from the person, let us know, but wordpress does not automatically assign usernames, so I think the cookie thing might have been the cause.

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  johndilligent · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 10:29 pm

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  Okay. This is not the first weird problem he’s brought to my
  attention, so who knows what all’s going on on his end. My
  gut’s telling me we’re not getting the whole story here any-
  way.

  JD

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  johndilligent · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 10:37 pm

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  Hey SP,

  On a lark I entered Greg Salmom in the Google search engine text
  box and hit “enter”. And guess what came back?

  A reply to a WordPress.com blog by one Greg Salmom.

  You da man, SP! You’re a genius!

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  raincoaster · Member · Jan 20, 2011 at 10:46 pm

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  In my experience, internet drama follows some people like the scent of Chanel No 5 follows others. This dude is only going to become MORE of a pain in the butt as time goes on; your gut is very wise.