Michael, the first thing to ask yourself is what information do Mudcat hold on you? The main source of information is the stuff you chose to provide on the membership page and at present, there is nothing to enforce the validity of any information there.

Assuming Max is not involved in ilegal hacking, in most cases there is little he can to to establish the personal identity of a poster. In that sense, I think Joe Offer's comments have been a little missunderstood.

The HTTP headers sent with your request for a page will kick out information such as the IP address, the browser and operating system you are using, any cookie information, information contained within forms, etc. so in most cases, you don't exactly have to be Einstein to work out that "he who posted this, also posted that". I think that is what Joe meant and in most circumstances they will know what is going on.

IP addresses can of course be traced and I don't know Max's position if he was asked by authorities to disclose the IP address for a post. One thing I can be fairly sure on though is that (assuming the ISP has the information) they would be unlikely to give personal information to a forum operator. I would suspect "I've got this troll at Mudcat, please can I have his name and address so I can deal with him" would be greeted by laughter. Besides any of this, you could always mask your real IP address by using a proxy.

Jon