Why would you get thank-yous from an anonymous IP address?

Question

Does anyone know what or who is 65.13.208.203?

I have never seen this before yet I had "thank yous" from them. I would not think too much of it but they thanked me for making edits to my daughters profile and I know no one from my family has been on and I do not know of anyone else who should have permission that would of noticed I edited anything on her profile.  Little disconcerting.

Answer 1

Hi Brian,

An IP address like that is recorded when the user isn't signed-in. If I had to take a guess, it could be a family member who does have a WikiTree account and saw an e-mail update that included the change. When they clicked the link in their e-mail they weren't already signed-in and didn't think to do that first.

If you were really concerned, you could track down the IP. You might be able to find out the location where it's used, or at least the ISP.

Chris

Answer 2

Brian, you can use programs on your computer to find out more about IP addresses like these.  At the command prompt you can use "tracert <ip address>" to get clues about the address (if you dont understand this dont worry).

Suffice to say using tracert indicates that this IP is used by one of many ADSL connections to the internet by the ISP BellSouth (I assume in the southern USA).Cheers

Comments

Thanks. I guess my biggest issue from the beginning was that I did not realize people could like things without first logging in or even see anything as the things I changed on my daughters profile should not have been visible to the "general" public. I think I figured out what happened. I had invited my wife's grandmother (lives in Florida) to add stuff so she signed up and promptly snail mailed me some of the info she had - she is not very tech savy. I think she received the weekly update and came online and liked my daughters page even though she probably could not see any changes.
It was just a very weird confluence of random events that I just could not figure out at the time. Especially how someone who was not logged in to the site could see any changes I made to a private account. Thanks for the help.

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Just to emphasize for others who may see this: Brian's grandmother could not see any private changes when she was not logged-in. But she could see the "history item" describing the change (e.g. "Brian Chelton edited X's biography") and could click the "[thank Brian for this]" link next to it.

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Chris if you want to remove this question so to not create further confusion I totally understand. When I first had this question I debated whether this was the best place to ask it or not.

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Thanks, Brian, but I think this is a perfect example of a G2G question that's valuable to have future reference. I think I'll just edit the question itself from "Does anyone know what or who is 65.13.208.203?" to something like "Why would you get thank-yous from an anonymous IP address?"