Re: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter

> I won't go into the details of implementation here; that's up to the maintainers.

LOL... like Fermat's theorem too simple to be explained? ;-)

Look nobody will even consider implementing it w/o a good concept.

Cookies?
IP adress?
JS-magic?
Session-IDs?
Browser footprint?
combination of all?

Keep in mind that some threads continue over weeks.

And which identifier do we use? Are digits really sufficient?

And now at the latest I get the impression that using stile analysis to distinguish (the rare occasions of multiple) AnoMonks in one thread is more effective then trying to figure out how and why AM1 and AM2 got their IDs.

Nice idea, but far from trivial to implement.

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

Comment on Re: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter

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Re^2: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Jan 02, 2014 at 19:22 UTC
Something I did waaaaaaay back in the day, with some help from this very monastery, to support "anonymous" chat in a site was to do colors based on IP (such that the IP was not displayed, nor reversible, but used to make a hashed color for display of the user's chat session). It's only a good transitory/ephemeral solution though for something like chat and not so hot for the reasons you elaborated: temporal, IP/browser changes, etc. For your list, JS magic will be disallowed, I expect. And you can't rely on JS for client-side enforcement anyway (with hackers at least). For the rest: it could work quite well a lot of the time but at least some of the time it will lend a false sense of division to a single user no matter how it's done. With an IP anonymizer and two or three or four... browsers it would be pretty easy to appear to be a gang when it's really just one. And the more specific/careful the technique for keeping the AMs separate, the more likely a single anonymous monk will accidentally appear to be two or more. :\|	[reply]
Re^3: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter by PopeFelix (Beadle) on Jan 02, 2014 at 22:05 UTC
For the rest: it could work quite well a lot of the time but at least some of the time it will lend a false sense of division to a single user no matter how it's done. With an IP anonymizer and two or three or four... browsers it would be pretty easy to appear to be a gang when it's really just one. And the more specific/careful the technique for keeping the AMs separate, the more likely a single anonymous monk will <accidentally appear to be two or more. :\| Yes, this may well create a "false sense of division". As I said in another comment, I'm not worried about that - this isn't intended to cover all possible cases. This is intended to cover a significant majority of cases.	[reply]
Re^2: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter by PopeFelix (Beadle) on Jan 02, 2014 at 22:01 UTC
Cookies would seem to be an easy way to implement this, particularly given that this is in no wise intended to grant every AM a unique identity for all time. They can create an account for that. If a thread goes on for weeks, and for some reason AM-27 becomes AM-34, it's not a big deal. Similarly, if someone logs in from one browser to comment on a thread, and then logs in from a different browser to comment on that same thread, it's not a big deal for them to be both AM-27 and AM-24. Again, that's what accounts are for. As for whether to use digits or some other identifier, I have no particular opinion. Digits would seem to be sufficient, but I'm willing to believe otherwise.	[reply]


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