Hi

I've stumbled over something that caught my attention but I'm not familiar enough with IPs to know if this is suspect or irrelevant. If you'd take the time to read and respond I'd greatly appreciate it. I'm just stumped.

I've done a site for some people (4 in the group) awhile ago and set up a simple stats tracker on the site, and have checked it fairly regularly since it was launched...however, the group hit some unstable times so the site itself has been left unfinished. At any rate, checking the stats, I see 4 different IPs, 3 of which are from aol, and show 3 distinct IPs with the last segment #'d out so I have no idea of the last number/s. We're all local, same 2 cities.

One of the group sent an email awhile back shortly after the site was done and I noticed in the headers the IP showed as being the same as one on their site stats. Another was sent, and I saw the same initial base of the IP but the last 2 segments were different. At any rate, this one was the only one showing on the stats page with these specific numbers so I concluded that IP belonged to that person, and by deduction really on the others based on times I knew they were actively on the site, figured out which belonged to which.


On one of my personal sites the email sender was directed to it specifically, so when they checked, I saw the same IP show up on my stats at that time.

Now fast forward a year later just about. I have since gotten a new site with a forum but the forum is remote hosted. In September I scrapped the entire forum, cleaned the member rolls, topics and basically started over with a new subject matter. I even reset the stats counter. In the last 2 weeks people have been showing up, both from my personal advertising links on a blog and former site, but also from the open hosted forum. In the last 3 weeks of trying to add new content posts to the forum new people began signing up, registering. Half of them are re-registered from the last incarnation. No problem.

Last week, an incident happened between myself and the email sender mentioned above - nothng bad, just curious to me - and I'd been waiting on a response on some business from them. Three days later, I'd been checking the forum member list and noticed - of my 19 new members - that one of them had a curious username, which was why I checked the profile. The email used was from aol but the way it had been structured was similar to the email sender's known address, also from aol. Just as I was about to X out, I noticed the IP number....and it was the very same IP number that appeared in the group's site stats, as well as containing the same base in the email sender's headers. The sender does use aol as the isp, and not aol web based email.

The IP resolves to aol in Virginia so I can't get a localized version regardless, so I typed the forum IP, containing the last segment (it shows as # in the site stats, not the whole thing), and eventually discover the same IP is apparently being used all over the place, even search results from several years ago from all sorts of people all over the country.

I'm not sure what to think but my original toss was wondering if it's just some random aol user that just happened to appear on the forum and register, using an aol username style strikingly similar to the senders, or could this be the same person that sent the email, that's part of the group, since in the case of the forum, the subject matter is very specific, it's not an all purpose forum, nor is the target audience the general public, however the topic periodically addresses the members of the group. On the other hand, the forum still belongs to me, the one who created a site for this group, so the IP seemed too relevant to me, rather than "random."

If the email header IP shows as, for example, 123.456.78.900 (for email) specifically, this same IP shows up in the group's stats as 123.456.78.# - while the other aol users who appeared would have their IPs as 098.765.432.1 or 23.456.78.9 - distinctive, and on the specific arrival logged on my site a year ago as 123.456.78.# when I knew sender was on the site, and then showing up on the forum is 123.456.78.90 ....from aol...however, apparently aol doles out 123.456.78.90 to millions of people??

Could this be the same person? It *feels* like it's such an obvious "duh" yeah, but when I learned that aol doles it out it made me question it.

Also, just for the official record about my personal site stats and aol visitors, for every 300 people only about 2 of them actual are using aol. I've checked my stats regularly enough to pick up that aol users apparently aren't the norm on the site. Even the new tracker I installed on the forum showed 35 people in about an hour and none of them were aol users.

Coincidence? Random? Am I missing something or staring straight at it?

Thank you so much and I apologize for the length...I just would like to know so I don't jump to any conclusions unnecessarily.