BTW since I posted this morning I have had about 40 spams and they have attached my e mail address and using it as the source of their BS and have sent 100s of e mails from my e mail address..
Thank you thank you thank you
Every post shows the IP address of the poster. That could be removed. It was added during a time of some really, truly nasty trolls on the board. One of their tricks was multiple posting personas. Showing the IPs was a way to minimize that.
In any case, it has probably outlived it's usefulness.