St. Louis Post-Dispatch outs commenter, job loss follows

A single vulgar word cost a man his job. Commenting on a blog posting asking for the strangest things a person has eaten, the commenter twice tried to post the same swear word

After the initial swear word was erased, the commenter posted it again. At this point, the Post Dispatch's blog author decided to take this to another level. Because the blog was on the Wordpress format, the IP address of every comment is sent to the blog's administrators. Kurt Greenbaum is the blog administrator in question, and when he saw this particular IP address came from a school, he alerted the school to the comment. The school in turn was able to do some impressive detective work, and found out who had posted the comment. It turned out to be an employee of the school, who, according to the Post Dispatch; after being confronted with the situation, "resigned on the spot" The situation doesn't quite end there. Greenbaum, whether boasting about the issue as many of his readers have subsequently accused him of, or whether he just wanted to let people know he had dealt with a vulgar anonymous poster; posted another blog post detailing the incident, and a firestorm erupted. Of the 151 comments that were posted before the comments section was closed, almost all of them were decidedly against the Post Dispatch's decision to out this employee to the school, whether or not the intention was to get the employee fired, or simply to alert the school to a poster who was crossing the decency line. That story has taken on a story of its own, as Greenbaum has had to post several followups, explaining his actions, and attempting to let readers know that it is not the usual behavior of the paper to do such a thing, and that he did not violate the commenter's privacy by alerting the school