> It's not your name that is important to me, but distinguishing which posts > all were by the entity that I'm reading now. Providing pseudonymous identifiers to users without requiring them to sign in could be achieved by calculating [HMAC] of their IP address combined with their `User-Agent` or some other headers. As long as the hash function is strong and the secret is kept secret it should be practically impossible to reverse the salted hash values back to plaintext input. The "identifier" could be made even shorter (and impossible to reverse) by truncating (or XOR-combining) the HMAC value to a shorter length. Though I would understand it if you wouldn't like this solution: the "identifier" is both hard to understand (just a bunch of bytes) and too easy to change, even accidentally. [HMAC]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAC