Imported from previous forum
Its admin only. Noone else can see them.
You can check the visibility of any field by adopting a non-admin identity using "login as" or see a public view by logging out altogether.
The IP address, username and e-mail address all "click-through" to a security blacklisting aggregator, so this info is useful for conducting due diligence on suspect spammers/link-farmers. The site intercepts and quarantines registration attempts from IP addresses with poor reputation, and if any do get through and if you use "delete spammer" the offendingusers credentials are registered back with the blackilisting service, which will prevent any r epeat attempts.
We run "honeypot" sites with deliberate security holes to attract and identify spammers trying to exploit platform-specific vulnerabilities, and monitor attempts to register across multiple sites concurrently, as this is a known spammer pattern. This intercepts up to 95% of all malicious regsitartion attempts, and this very significantly reduces the site moderation overhead. You cant do any of this without collecting IP Adresses. Without this you would be getting thousands of malicious registatrations per day, and become a bot target..
Try clicking on a profile IP Address and you will be able to see that IP Address' collated reputation across >3 forum spamlist services and 16 or so DNS blacklisting services.
Here is an example of one that I checked earlier because of a suspect username, and you will see he has a single blacklisting... but not a high enough risk-score to prevent registration, but I would have my eye on him...
whereas ones like this "Agiseeripse - "Agiseeripse" <laiqu08@guccibagshere.com>" have been quarantined completly, and not able to complete registration.
The site also automatically quarantines suspect content posts for moderation, using the AKISMET service... in fact it has quarantined two of yours because its a cut and paste of an e-mail narrative, which contains content likely to constitute personal data (exposed e-mail addresses, which should be redacted if posted to avoid breaching data protection legislation).
eg http://www.fixtradingcommunity.org/pg/akismet/moderation/
Site moderators can then review these for release or deletion.....
You will note that your posts do not display, because they regsiter as suspicious on Akismet.
As I am a site admin I can't tell whether this information is displayed univerally to members/logged in users or not. Are a user's IP address of their last login displayed to everyone?
If it is isn't this an security issue? On the old site no one sees a user's IP address except site admin and only if we are looking at file download records. The IP address is never logged as part of a user's profile itself.
Personally I have concerns about this...IP addresses can become a "locator" piece of information. I would also think our member firms may have issue with IP addresses logged and associated with a user, and then display in a "public" manner.