How To Find The Ip Address Of A Tumblr Blog

Admin Note: We felt this was important and more people should know it.

Now, a lot of people have been getting a lot of hate recently from people abusing the anonymous messages system. Now, these haters tend to be cowards and use the anon system because they can say what they like without fear of consequences. NOT ANYMORE! :) Because you CAN fight back and take something the haters will miss. Their anonymity. And that doesn't mean you have to shut the anon feature down, so Magic Anons can still be used by RPers. In the past, there used to be a method of gaining an IP address straight from Tumblr, by right clicking the block button on the hate message and pressing "view source". The IP address would come back in amongst the page's source code.

But, for some reason Tumblr disabled that feature. There is, however, a workaround. Simply sign up for an account at StatCounter and reconfigure your theme settings on Tumblr. That easy. There's instructions on how to do that here from Online Investigations from Australia. Their instructions show how to set up the tracking system using Google Analytics and StatCounter. What I'm going to do here is show you how it works AFTER you set it up. For this, I'll be using StatCounter because it is the better program of the two. Google Analytics will only give you general locations, StatCounter gives you IP addresses, these are useful. Now, while IP addresses can be faked, it's hard to do that, so most anon's won't bother. Plus, if you have a pile of anon hate originating from the same source, it'll have the same IP unless the hater is spoofing their IP (broadcasting an IP that isn't their own) for every single message. And besides, StatCounter will also show you other stuff on your hater, like their OS, their browser and their ISP. All useful information that can be used to further identify the hater and potentially deal with them.

First off, set up a StatCounter account as shown in the instructions linked above, creating the account on StatCounter and then copying the code given by StatCounter into your Tumblr theme by editing the HTML of your theme and inserting the code at the bottom but before the </body></html> tags. StatCounter should confirm that the tracker is working. MAKE SURE YOU SET STATCOUNTER TO TRACK YOUR TUMBLR URL! So, for me this would be www.meet-the-ashford-twins.tumblr.com. Your's will be of the pattern blogname.tumblr.com. Now, here's how the tracker works. Every time someone visits your blog, it'll tell you who they are (IP address) and where they've come from (ie, if they typed your address into their address bar, it'll say direct. If they came from Google, it'll say Google and if they clicked on your icon from their dash, it'll tell you so), as well as a date and time. This should work REGARDLESS of whether or not they use functions such as Private Browsing available in Firefox, Opera and Chrome. I've only tested it on Opera though, but it still saw me when I used a Private Browsing tab.

Here's where the fun begins. Let's assume your hater, who for simplicities sake, I'm going to call Captain Courage, has visited your blog from their dashboard. The tracker will record their visit to your blog. Then, they click on the Ask button on your blog. The tracker will show this, because the Ask function uses a separate page, namely blogname.tumblr.com/ask. THEY WILL VISIT THIS PAGE BEFORE THEY EVEN HIT THE ANON BUTTON AND THE TRACKER WILL SEE IT! Captain Courage spews some hate and you see your +1 icon pop up. When you see it's hate, make a note of the date and time, because for some reason Tumblr doesn't show you. Then match the date and time to the IP logs on SiteCounter. Simple as that. For best results, do it on a couple of anon hate messages. The times will vary but unless you have a smart anon hater, their IP address shouldn't. This will also work if they use the shortcut of clicking on the ! that appears on your icon and then right-clicking 'ask'. Below, I'm going to show you, with screenshots, this working. I asked one of my good friends to send me two messages, one normally and one with some anon hate. You can see both below, I've only blacked out my friend's name.

Obviously, you have to have the tracker set up to do this next part. Go to StatCounter and log in, then look at your site's recent visits. In this case, I know full well which one is my friend. The middle one. The top one is me and the lower one I don't know. I've blacked out names and cities.

Now, by going into that middle entry, I get my friend's details, their OS, browser, stuff like that. I also get what pages they got to me from. Notice the bottom one's been blacked out? It's because she visited from her blog, so her username was RIGHT THERE IN THE URL! How useful if I didn't know who she was!

Now, let's assume you have a Captain Courage who's got a braincell and continuously spoofs their IP for every message. Game over right, we can't narrow them down? WRONG! In this case, you use the evidence from StatCounter and give a copy to Tumblr. If your anon is logged into Tumblr, then Tumblr will record their IP in Tumblr's records. Getting Tumblr to match their records with yours will reveal your Captain Courage's real name! Now, Tumblr may try and weasel out of doing it. But if the hate gets too bad and you have tracked it, you're in a great position to GO TO THE POLICE AND GET THEM TO GIVE TUMBLR A HARD TIME 'TIL TUMBLR GIVES THEM THE ANON'S ID! So, reblog this post, signal boost it like crazy and spread the knowledge, but remember: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility