Member with 396k posts?

[used red MN]

How does Anonymous-0 get so many posts? I have ran across older posts by “Anonymous” It must have been allowed to post without a sign in at one point.
REO garden tractor post

 

[cpratt]

Yep, that fellow posted a lot!

The reason is, there were no usernames at all for many years, so older posts all got lumped under Anonymous-0 (I created that when I imported the posts in, it's not really a guest account on here). I had to have some username to import them under but the posts were not connected to any username. I don't know the exact dates, but anything before 2003 had no username since the system didn't support them. About then, we created a way that people could reserve the name they used so it would be uniquely theirs. Even after that, since it depended on having a cookie, a lot of users freaked thinking that a cookie was a security problem (they didn't understand cookies), so we still let them post without creating an account as long as they used a name that wasn't reserved by someone else (they just skipped the password and it let them post). That became crazy after a bit with people posting as other people intentionally, so we finally forced the issue and made people enter a password (for their own good) and real registered accounts were born. But that practice continued well into the 2000s before we stopped it. There will be some after 2007 which still look that way just because of the brokenness between classic and modern. About 2010, I consolidated the two systems so that at least the accounts would sync. There will not be many Anonymous-0 posts after 2010.

 

[DoubleO7]

How does Anonymous-0 get so many posts? I have ran across older posts by “Anonymous” It must have been allowed to post without a sign in at one point.
REO garden tractor post

That person is a

How does Anonymous-0 get so many posts? I have ran across older posts by “Anonymous” It must have been allowed to post without a sign in at one point.
REO garden tractor post

That same guy is also able to post without logging in. !
He has many posts attributed to him that were made in 2023.
Yet his profile says he was last seen in 2014.

 

[cpratt]

That person is a



That same guy is also able to post without logging in. !
He has many posts attributed to him that were made in 2023.
Yet his profile says he was last seen in 2014.

All the posts were made in 2023 and 2024 as far as input to this system. I'd be interested to see which happened in 2023 because it might mean I missed a date setting somewhere. The gallery photos have associated anonymous posts that would probably be 2024.