Last night I received an email that was extremely odd. A friend of mine sent me a message about a comment left on her blog.
It had my name on it and it was really nasty. Not Newscoma, but my real name which I don’t post or comment under.
She talks about it at her place and I’m not going to say anything more about it other than it was more than disturbing because the comment was mean-spirited. Initially, I was really angry because it was one of those random, unneccessary things that I’ve seen happen before but had never happened to me.
After the initial shock of seeing someone not only act incredibly ugly to her, it was a slam against me because it not only used my real name and whoever wrote it used one of those silly little things I write about in signature stuff around the Internet.
After awhile, we all became internet detectives™ and had a couple of interesting hours checking it out. Someone hid their identity through an anonymiser. Heck, they even had a fake email address.
With that said, most people know my real name. I have no problem with that. The situation did bear to mind that I understand why so many people blog anonymously. Newscoma is a nickname that came from a conversation several years ago and a random email address I set up before I ever started blogging.
I am always, even in my advanced age, surprised when things like this happen. Naive about it might be a more appropriate statement. I guess it was my turn.
The good thing is that we have a ton of friends who helped both of us out and assured me they knew it wasn’t me. We all know each other well enough to be able to realize it was malicious. Bloggers have lives outside of blogging and we have established relationships where we talked about that situation and we support each other outside of sitting behind our computers.
This is another lesson that these things could happen to anyone. There are times that I get a little fatigued with the games that happen in the blogging world.
Just be careful. Know your IP address. Also realize that your IP address can be tracked. And if your hiding it under an anonymizer, that’s a big warning sign.
Also don’t hesitate to ask questions if something doesn’t make sense. My friend did and we avoided a huge problem by communicating about it openly and frankly.
That’s what friends do.
Have a good Wednesday.
