I don't even know how to find stuff like that out?! :lol:
I saw him on my profile page by scrolling down. Yours is
HERE, and shows your ten most recent visitors, like mine. Not everyone's profile does this; it's based on settings in each user's control panel. Your most recent visitors section also tells you when those members visited, so you have an idea what happens when.
You can find a member's status under their name, either on the boards or on their profile page, as in the case of Mr. bond here. Look right below their Reputation bar on the left side of their page and you'll see which "Group" they belong to. Active members say Members, Mods say Moderators, and so on. In Mr. bond's case, he never completed his activation process, so his Group is Validating.
Also in that area you can find a person's last active period, which for Mr. bond was today at 12 Noon.
So far I doubt I'm telling you anything you don't already know.
If you copypasta Mr. bond's entire name, jamesbond, you can go to the Moderator Bar up top and click on IP Lookup. That'll take you to the magic area. You don't have his IP from any of his posts, so you'll click on the bottom left on Member Look-up Tool, and paste his name there. That'll get you to a results page showing their Name, IP Address, Posts, Date Registered and Group. On the far right of that is a link to a page where you can edit some of the member's stuff, like their avatar, member photo, any of their personal links, their sig and their About Me page.
OK, so you're at the page where you found out the IP the person used to register. If you copy that IP and then click on IP Address Look-up Tool on the left, you're back where you can find out who his IP is, or at least, the IP they used to register. Pasting jamesbond's IP into the tool gets you... nothing.
But you're not out of options yet. If you look below the report section of that page, you see a link to
nic.com, which provides a WHOIS lookup tool. Paste bond's IP in there and you find that his IP is listed as "Private Address Space."
What the heck does that mean? If you wiki this stuff, it turns out the most likely reason his IP is a "black hole" is that he used a proxy server when he went through the application process. There's a bunch of technical jargon in there that doesn't concern this discussion, but that's what my digging leads me to believe.
So what we have in Mr. bond is a person who used an untraceable proxy server to start the registration process, never finished that process and likely gave a bogus email, but since he's listed as "Validating" he has partial access to the forums. He's been in this limbo state for over a year, during which he's visiting the site on a semi-regular basis, and he's looking at member profiles.
I would hope I'm not alone in finding that unusual.
