I hope I am not missunderstanding what is being discussed here. I only just caught onto this thread. From where the conversation starts I sense I have missed or not gotten to something further down the line yet. My listings show chronological with most recent at top. Hopefully I will catch on here.

I can attest to much of what you say. I was one who was trying hard to find the identity of one of our other pests a year or so ago. It turned into a total wild goose chase as some people who were clearly not the culprit were pointed to because in another post they got the same IP number that was previously or later given to the pest. All we could do is find that all the numbers being used by our target person were all AOL numbers. There wasn't even any georgraphic coordination to them so that couldn't even be used to any help. So they, the IP numbers that is, were basically useless. They were only valuable in that A bunch of complaints to AOL highlighting the IP Numbers, along with date and time of the messages and the guy was gone. Unfortunately, He appeared, then, to have went to his local super market or wherever and got a new disc and opened a new free account. A couple days or maybe a few hours later he was back.

It ended up that AOL users like myself could no longer post to this group without our posts being held to be screened. It would take quite some time in some cases before posts were listed. I, for example, was, obviously, identified by my IP in the system and all my posts held for screening or something.

To be honest, that even had a flaw that I later discovered. I won't go into how it was working but I never really noticed the inconvenience. My posts were all going through fine. However, one time, I did something differently than I normally did and found that I got a notice that my posts were being blocked. After a little experimentation I found out what was happening. So, there is a way around the screening of posts. Like I said though, I won't go into it in case the wrong person reads this. My lips, well fingers in this case are all tied up....

Incidentally, I don't know how my posts are coming up now. I have broadband and use Comcast for my access. However I do still have AOL. I would suspect in this case, my IP is indicating Comcast.