How can I find out who is behind a Web page ?

• How can the identity of a web page creator be discovered?I have a problem with a local web page that is letting out sensitive cave locations and I want to try to contact the owner and let them know and perhaps inform/convince them to remove the problem. The web page is rather odd for 2 reasons. 1) There are many spelling mistakes and the offending data is in the background images. The web page creator states emphatically that they will not give out the locations ,yet they inadvertently do with the background.This makes me think it is a neophyte web user and new cave explorer who is just enthusiastic about the caves. The fact that is in an Angelfire host adds to my neophyte thoughts. 2) Some of the terminology used on the web page indicate a very high level of cave and karst knowledge. I rarely use the terms and I work with cave scientists/geologists daily. This leads me to believe the web page is created in a neophyte style to cover for someone in the "know" to disseminate information that should not be shared. Caves unfortunately can have a lot of politics and some disgruntled people will purge information in retaliation for real or imagined "slights" This web page has become a problem for a few reasons. 1) Damage has already increased dramatically due to extra traffic in these rare and fragile examples. 2) The caves are partially on private property and the posting of the locations is severely threatening years of negotiated access. 3)Directions shared on the page lead to certain locations where severe bodily harm can easily happen due to certain biological elements and as well trespassing instructions. I will not post the web page as that would add fuel to the fire. Does anyone have any legal methods they can recommend to perhaps find this persons email/method of contact?

• Answer:

  I have some experience tracking down spammers, which might be applicable to your problem. However, without seeing the site it is difficult to offer any specific advice. I assume that when you say "Angelfire host" you mean they are using AngelFire's/Lycos' free hosting, not their for-pay domain hosting. Tracking down the owner of an anonymous site hosted by one of the free web hosts can be difficult if you don't have the cooperation of the host. Here are some techniques sometimes used by anti-spammers back when "post throw-away sites on uncooperative free hosts" was a common spammer tactic:"Follow the money" - spammers generally had to have some way collect the benefits from their spam. This probably doesn't really apply to your situation.External links - carefully examine all links away from the site, including the URLs for inline images. Sometimes you can deduce that another site is likely also maintained by the same person (perhaps an image host, another free provider, etc.). This site may contain contact information, or if not, the host for this other site may be more cooperative. Links that contain affiliate codes can also be useful in tracking down a site maintainer (although this, again, probably applies more to spammer's sites than your site).Hidden information - sometimes you can find clues in documents hosted at the site. HTML documents sometimes reveal information when you examine the HTML source. PDF and Word documents sometimes contain names in their metadata or other details. In particularly, a binary examination of a Word document might reveal content from earlier revisions of the document, such as contact information that was deleted. Even JPG images can have clues in EXIF tags or other metadata.website traffic packages - check and see if the site uses one of the free statistical pages. If you examine the source you can often see the account code. The free statistical packages sometimes default to having the gathered statistics being publicly viewable. You might be able to glean clues from this.website referrers - if you have reason to believe that the maintainer of the site occasionally examines the referrers to his or her site using a stat package (perhaps because they are interested in finding out when someone links to them), then there is a rather underhanded trick you can use. Over a period of time send a series of requests to their site that contain as their referrer a site that you operate (and to which you have access to the logs). If their stat package is one of the ones that produce reports using HTML (and many are), then if they click on your referrer to see your site you'll get their referrer (and more importantly, their IP address) in your log files.There are many other things you can try, but those are some good things to start with.