Due to the simplicity of blog comment, people are not required to enter user name or password to post on blog. This create a problem, that someone can easily use the other people’s name to post a comment, pretending to be the person he/she is actually not. More often, people just share the same name. It is more common when people just use their first time.

This is a trick to tell whether the two comments under the same name really belong to the same person.

Click the Icon Besides the Name

You may be aware that there is a small icon on the right of every name of the comment. This page shows all the comments made under this name.

Pay Attention to the Color

If you look carefully enough, you will see a short bar with a color on the left side of the name. Let me tell you the meaning of the color.

We have made the arrangement that people with the same email address will be shown with same color, and people with different emails have different color.

Here is one example:

It seems there are many people with name of Mark. As you can tell from this screenshot, all the Mark in this screen used different email addresses.

Email Addresses are Private

I assume email addresses are private information. I never share your email addresses with anybody else. The color is calculated by do a hash on the email address. Even the smallest change, like a space, or upper/lower case will change the color dramatically.

Be Cautious

Even with this mechanism in place, do not take it for granted that people posting with different email addresses are different persons. Someone may post under different email, or more easily, post under different names to express different opinions. Or people with the same email address is the same person. Someone else may know your email and post on behalf of you.

A false sense of certainty is worse than no such sense at all. So please take the assistant information just as reference, and don’t rely on it.

So, just be cautious. I am amazed how peaceful the blog has been in the last three and half years, under the anonymous nature of the blog comment. It is effort of the community member of this blog. I hope the peace continues.