AskWoody and IP addresses

Y’all know about IP addresses, yes? Those collections of four numbers, each from 0 to 255, that identifies stuff on the internet? The IP address for AskWoody is 35.196.195.48. You can see your own IP address if you go to the site whatismyipaddress.com. Here’s my IP address, early on a Saturday morning:

Every time you enter a name in your browser, like https://askwoody.com, there’s a little bit of translation going on behind the scenes that whisks you away to 35.196.195.48.

Every time you visit a web site, your IP address goes along for the ride. If you’re just surfing the web, you send your IP address to every site that you visit — that’s how the internet establishes the connection between you and the web site. You can fool the site by using a Virtual Private Network (or VPN) which sends the VPN server’s IP address, but for most people, most of the time, your IP address gets deposited at the site.

We use IP addresses at AskWoody, primarily as a defensive measure. So far this month, our defensive software has blocked more than 320,000 attempts to hit the site. Our spam catcher has caught more than 1.5 million attempted spam posts in the two years that we’ve been using it. Both work based on IP addresses — the people who sell those packages assemble massive collections of “bad” IP addresses and use them (among other techniques) to cut off problems before they happen.

IP addresses also fuel advertising — they’re the stock-in-trade for companies like Google, who use your browsing history (and many other factors) to sell you things. One of my proudest moments on AskWoody came a couple of weeks ago when I pulled the plug on Google ads, relying on Plus Memberships to keep the site going. We still have a couple of ads and trackers, to be sure, but they’re a small shadow of their former selves. I intend to get rid of almost all of them when we’ve finished swallowing the whale — absorbing the million-plus posts and hundreds of active posters currently on Windows Secrets.

The people who moderate posts on AskWoody — the ones who weed out or edit the objectionable posts — also have access to IP addresses. They come in very handy when, as we saw last week, someone couldn’t post because he was getting caught by our automated bad IP trap. They also tell us when someone’s posting with two different usernames from the same location. As you might imagine, that raises alarms.

Moderators on WordPress sites (there are more than 75 million of them — somewhere around 30% of the web) like this one also have access to something called a Dashboard, which (when it works correctly anyway) puts all of the moderating tools within reach. The dashboard has a small link back to the WordPress mothership, so WordPress can keep mods posted on upcoming events. Here’s what mine looks like:

You can think of the dashboard as targeted advertising — in my case, it knows that I’m accessing the dashboard from Nashville, so it shows me events that are coming up in the Nashville area. Well, Dayton is a stretch, but nevermind.

Some folks think that’s a horrible invasion of privacy. I think it’s marginally useful — and if I were really concerned, I’d just log into my dashboard through a VPN.

No, AskWoody IP addresses aren’t being sent to WordPress (except, obviously, the IP address of moderators using their dashboards). Unlike two weeks ago, IP addresses aren’t being sent to advertisers (with a few exceptions, which I’ll weed out soon). They are being sent to our attack and spam trackers.

That’s what’s really happening.

Unlike most site owners who dread coming restrictions on privacy and sharing IP addresses, I welcome it with open arms. It’s long past time that the US should join the EU in implementing GDPR-like controls.

I hate sites with pop-over, pop-under, rolling, intrusive, subtle and invisible advertising.

Your privacy is important to me. My privacy is important to me (yes, even though I use Gmail, rely on a Chromebook, and love my Alexa).

I thank my lucky stars that we can pay for AskWoody without advertising. With your help, we can keep it that way.

By the by… in case you didn’t know, we have one of the toughest privacy statements in the business.