Syag Lchochma-
It’s really not too interesting or worth losing sleep over.
I’m going to try to give all the details but some of the posts I’m going to reference have disappeared over the decade so it’s hard to fact check.
The first post from a “Joseph” that caught my attention and was an inside joke that was going on at work and I showed it to a colleague of mine and asked him if he thought it was a different colleague whose name is Joseph. He agreed that the poster either worked with us or a competitor unless it was just a strange coincidence. After checking out the other posts by “Joseph” we came to the conclusion that they were too radical to be from our coworker.
Sometime later I was reading a post that I suspected was from a “Jospeh” and he used a word not in my vocabulary that I had to look up in the dictionary. Around the same time I was on a secular (albeit professional) website where the same thing happened. Those are the only two times I recall having to look up a word in the dictionary that I came across in an online forum. Given that some of the interests that our “Joseph” had coincided with the poster on the other site I began to follow the two of them very closely.
I noticed another pattern in the two of them in that they both asked questions to new members that they seemed to know (or, based on proven expertise in a topic, should have known) the answer to. I don’t know what the point of this was, possibly to build trust amongst new members, but whatever it was- the pattern was clearly there.
The poster on the other site posted pretty much daily except for Shabbos which I thought was a good indication that the poster is Frum despite the screen name. I waited patiently for the next Yom Tov to see if this poster happened to be away for Saturdays or was actually observant. When the next Yom Tov came and my “friend” didn’t post I suspected the latter.
I wanted to share my findings with other CR posters but those that I outed denied being who they were and Moderator-80 was very clever and making sure we didn’t leave any personal information so that posters can contact each other.
The idea that I came up with was to encode a message by using a private key based on some numbers that were used in one thread with an encryption method described in a different thread. I figured that a handful of posters who recalled both of those posts would be able to figure out how to decode the message and contact me on the email address that I set up for this purpose.
There were a few posters who decoded the message and contacted me but I was only able to verify that 2 of them were the poster they claimed to be.
Once I was in contact with these other trusted posters I shared my findings and we were above a 99.99% confidence level that these two posters were the same.
I continued my surveillance on the other site until I hit a payday. A different poster at the site asked for assistance with a question and the solution was easier to explain with a word document than by typing in a response box on a forum. Instead of sending the OP a PM he embedded a Word document (it seems to have been removed since then)- and to my delight he neglected to remove the metadata from the file! I now had his full name and place of employment!
Now, I can’t say for sure if “Joseph” was just one step ahead of me and sent me on a wild goose chase by leaving red herring all over the place but I did get a huge amount of satisfaction. I wouldn’t know if any of the pictures I came across while searching his name are actually him- so I don’t know if I ever saw him in person. There was someone who was in Yeshiva at the same time as my brother-in-law with the same name I never pursued if it was the same person or not as I thought it may lead to Lashon Hora.