@batar447:
You wrote:
"All you would need to do is take a 1x1 pixel image hosted on your server externally somewhere, imbed it into a post that you make, on the back end you can setup logging to see what ip addresses hit your image.
...
At least that's an easy way to gather IPs from a site, you could probably use javascript creatively to further isolate users to IPs."
Ahhh.. you are right. But the 1x1 image (or any image for that matter) linked back to your server would give you a flood of IP addresses, with no connection to usernames. Even the IP addresses of non-members.
I was pondering the realistic possibility of someone harvesting IP address/username combinations. Like some of the other users have stated (as well as you), what do you do with it even if you get the IP address? You can't get the exact ID of the person from the IP, and that alone casts doubt on JTB's claim - because there's no payoff. The payoff for all this "hacking" would be the identities of the active elders and users that leak information they don't want leaked, I would think. But JTB was claiming getting the IP address for forum users was very simple. Even this doesn't seem to be the case...
Now what do you mean about creative javascript? There would have to be some way to get javascript, within script tags, into the post. Linking to an image is one thing, causing the browser to connect to the image URL to download the image (which would give the server the opportunity to log the IP); but if you wanted the broswer to download and run a script, even if it was located on another server, you need to get some script tags in there. I noticed that JWN has an HTML edit option, what happens if you put some javascript in there?
MeanMrMustard