"Speaking of banning. Sure, people can go from IP to IP, but it takes effort."
This thing about the IP address is confusing the Ant. When I lived in NJ I had a static IP address and thus anyone could identify my router as being the source of a post. My IP address did not change for seven years.
Now I have an ISP that assigns a new IP address to my router each time my router is disconnected and reconnected to the ISP's network. I understand that each ISP has a range of IP addresses assigned to them, but that would only allow you to identify my ISP, not me. If I did not have a router, the ISP would assign a new IP address to my PC at each login.
Also the ISP assigns the IP address to my router, not each PC behind the router. The router assigns an IP address to each machine, but the Internet does not see these IP addresses. Although it would not matter for identification purposes which specific PC in my home I am using, it does matter if the router belongs to a company. Then there is no way to identify the specific employee, only the company.
Thus, I don't understand how people here can identify individuals based on their IP address, especially if they use dial-up, or only have one PC which they log in and out of daily.