Late last week I received several comments on an old post from last year under the name “Victoria Redmayne” that listed “MarthaEXXXXXX@hotmail.com” (last name redacted—see below) as the email address.  These comments came from 66.141.49.243, which is a DSL IP in the Austin area (adsl-66-141-49-243.dsl.austtx.swbell.net).  The first comment was rather obnoxious (the text consisted solely of the poorly formed sentence “you r so gay u fagish com. geek fuck u!”), so I deleted it and the one that followed (”.anyone who whant to get it on with me just call me at 260XXXX” (phone number redacted—see below) and banned the IP from posting further comments.

Today I received another comment in one of last week’s posts from this same person (or at least someone using the same name and email address) that consisted solely of the text “my# is 512259XXXX”.  This post came from 204.57.104.6, which turns out to be ce1.leanderisd.org.

I’m coming to suspect that this is a young teenager (the piss-poor texting style of the first post would also have been a dead giveaway) who is trying to perform the web version of the old bathroom wall theme.  I suspect that the phone number belongs to some poor girl who probably rejected this loser. 

Anyhow, I called the Leander school district and talked to someone at their technology helpdesk to give them the relevant info.  Hopefully it will only be a matter of time before they track down the PC from which this was sent.  Whether that will reveal the identity of the culprit is another matter, though.

But remember this: everything you do on the Internet leaves traces behind.

While I don’t require a valid email address or name to post here, the IP address of every comment is logged.  Even with dynamically assigned IPs (like with dialup), it is often possible to find the identity of the user (most ISPs have DHCP server logs that could be used to identify the dial-up caller that got the address; the same holds true for DSL and cable modems).

Update: The troll has changed his name to “viciredkillyou” (Is this a threat?) and is still posting from school.  Instead of banning him I’m changing all his comments to say something else.  We’ll see how long this goes on.