It seems that some people are finding it fun to write comments on other sites while using another person’s identity. John Chow has fallen victim to this and it has prompted him to ask why do people pretend to comment as someone else?:

I think that the answer is actually quite simple. At the moment, people appear to be doing it simply “because they can” and are having a bit of fun writing as if they were John Chow. I wouldn’t call it harmless fun, but it’s a fact of life that there are some people out there who derive pleasure from being annoying and troublesome.

It is currently happening on a number of sites with quite crude comments which perhaps indicates that there are some people out there who would like to hurt John Chow’s reputation - they want to take the big man down!

Apart from the possibility of slightly impacting on a blogger’s reputation, there are a number of other consequences:

• Comments now contain more junk than ever before! The same people that just a few months ago were raving about “rewarding commentators” and “giving back the community” are now turning off their ‘Top Commentators’ plugin, removing DoFollow and considering disallowing signatures in comments. Why? Because the people that are being rewarded are the ones that are writing the spammy, useless comments on the blogs! I definitely sense that the positive mood towards commentators has changed in just the last few months!

• Bloggers can create fake comments on their own site. Small bloggers can use a top blogger’s identity and give their site more credibility and an enhanced reputation. I remember receiving a comment from Problogger once on Cash Quests and many people commented just about how I had received a comment from him! Now I could have him comment on every post!

• Discussions in comments will become meaningless. It’s a pointless conversation if you can’t be 100% sure that the person who wrote the comment REALLY wrote the comment. If John Chow was to leave a comment on one of my sites now, I would hesitate to reply as I couldn’t be sure that it was really him leaving the comment.

• Registration will be required. Unless there is a fix to the identity theft problem, you can expect to have to register if you want to write comments on the top sites. It is ridiculous to think that a post on John Chow dot com could be filled with fake comments written by fake John Chow wannabes. John Chow has hinted at comment registration as a solution, and if that happens you know that the rest of the blogosphere will follow!

I’m glad that Cash Quests won’t be experiencing any of these consequences!

While some have speculated that it involves hacking an account and stealing login details, it is actually very simple if you want to leave a comment as a top blogger. All you need to do is enter the regular comment information and the comment plugin will automatically grab the avatar from MyBlogLog and display it.

But you need the e-mail address!

Well, that’s where John Chow got caught as his e-mail is publicly available via his WhoIs information. However, even if it wasn’t there all it takes is the blogger to leave a comment on your site and you’ve got their e-mail. Hence, simply using a throwaway e-mail address for MyBlogLog and comments won’t work.

I tested it out and was able to do leave a comment as John Chow without any more information than his e-mail address.

Like most things on the internet, I see this spreading as it becomes more well known and more popular. The sad fact is that it will enhance reputations, drive traffic and make some people a little bit more cash. Techniques that make money spread - so this will spread!

At least you know that you won’t find the problem on Cash Quests!

(Disclaimer: Images in this post were created on a private site to test the technique and subsequently deleted. None of the bloggers actually left those comments anywhere and the Joel Comm image was pure PhotoShop as I have no desire to seek out his e-mail address)

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