When you submit a comment on my blog (or any WordPress blog), you have to leave an email. I can see the emails people use.
Some people have left comments as “anon” or “anonymous” or similar, but continued to use the email they post under most of the time. That means I know who left the comment. Obviously, I would never publicly connect an anon’s identity to their main pseudonym; I will hold any information I get this way in confidence. But it’s very legitimate to not trust me, and if you don’t I would suggest using a fake email. (This works fine with WordPress.)
Thanks!
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Anyone who cares deeply about such things should also be aware that WordPress exposes a hash of your email address (a number that’s effectively random, but always the same number for the same email) via gravatar. So if you use the same email to comment on multiple blogs (or anywhere else that uses gravatar), even if it’s a fake email, then other people can tell that those comments were posted by someone who put the same email in the form.
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Note that it doesn’t check whether the email address is a valid one, or one that the commenter has access to.
Also the hash used by gravatar is md5, which has been considered dangerously outdated for over a decade. Assume that anyone who can see your gravatar monster can find the associated email address.
If anyone wants to reply to this using a fake email address, let me know and I’ll try to crack the gravatar to get the address.
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I’d like to see this.
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