There Is No Cat

Who am I?

I discovered something funny in the way Radio Userland tracks comments on Radio-authored weblogs. The entire attribution bit is keyed on your e-mail address system-wide. So when I went to visit my friend Andy’s weblog tonight and see if there had been any comments following up something I posted there, my comment was attributed to someone named Vanessa. Vanessa?

I’ve been burned in the past by leaving a usable e-mail address on Radio weblogs (scraped by spammers back when Dave Winer didn’t think spam was a problem), so as a matter of policy, I don’t do that any more. I use the address "me@privacy.net", which is an address that automatically bounces back a message to whoever sends something to it saying "someone gave you this address because they didn’t want to hear from you and/or didn’t want their address scraped by spammers." Apparently Vanessa uses the same trick. Because attribution is keyed on the e-mail address used, any time someone posts a comment to a Radio Userland-authored weblog that uses Userland’s comment system and uses that e-mail address, it changes all attributions everywhere within the system. So poor Vanessa is now the author of a comment on a blog somewhere that’s credited to Herman Munster, at least until the next time someone posts a comment to a Radio-authored blog using the e-mail address "me@privacy.net".

I love it when a poor design choice is exposed like this....

Posted at 6:38 PM