Whats Made your day or not.....

In all honesty, how would you know if he did?

I'm a very light user of social media, I lurk regularly on one or two politics and science forums but don't have an account, and I post here (when not lost in the vortex) and that's it.

But even I know VPNs are easy to use and have many good reasons why one might use them (an extra layer of security for one's online banking, for example.) Or one could register via one's mobile network/fibre/one of the local cafes or libraries with internet access, etc., etc. A different IP address every time. I'm assuming IP addresses are only checked during sign-up, because we can't be restricted on where we can subsequently login from.

And then I'm sure there are many internet 'dark arts' to hide IP addresses which I don't know about or want to know about. But I doubt they would be difficult to find if I did want to know about them.

My point is, I could easily create another account if I chose. Email addresses grow on trees, IP addresses are very easily hidden even with wholly commercial and legitimate methods such as a VPN or a simple change of location. I wouldn't, because it wouldn't be 'open', and what would be the point? But if someone less decent than Davy wanted to create one or two or a dozen new accounts, are the mods sure you would be able to spot it?

If you discount obvious, even very obvious giveaways such as personal attitudes, likes/dislikes, writing and posting styles, what is there that you could rely on to say this is/is not a duplicate account if the email and IP addresses are different, from a different location, even a different country?

I expect this last bit will get my post deleted, but if you at least all read it first. I appreciate the difficulty of proving a negative, however if user X looks and sounds and acts like user Y and User Z and user Z1 etc, then they very probably are all the same person, whatever the technological checks may say to the contrary.

They wouldn't, clearly.

It is very hard to prove conclusively but to anyone who's here every single day it is fairly obvious. If it looks like a duck... walks like a duck... and quacks... then it is a duck!

The mods? They see what they want to see. But, they make the rules... so we move on and see what 2024 brings.

Happy New Year to everyone!

my parents used to put out food for birds  (my mother has stopped because even with sunflower hearts the pigeons were making a mess as they got the food out of the feeders).

There were occasional visits by sparrowhawks - I remeber one moment when all the finches hid in a bush and a sparrowhawk started flying fast in a circular route that took it through a small gap in the bush again and again until one of the finches lost it's nerve and tried to escape.  The other finches got away

Their speed and dexterity in flight are astonishing.

I was outside our local post office once, just about to put a letter in the postbox, when a sparrowhawk shot between me and the postbox, grabbed a sparrow from the ground and was gone.

Very bad for the sparrow of course, but an amazing wildlife moment quite literally right under my nose.