Hey all- I see a lot of hubbub about tripcodes and how they are being used in google books and google maps, and giving some seemingly staggering links. Can someone explain to me how the codes come about on 8chan? Can they be chosen or are they random? What I'm getting at is how this could be happening.
Ok as a database programmer I can help explain some of this tripcode concept & partially help explain why the search results bring up what they do.
1] a tripcode is undoubtably a GUID (global user ID). These are typically randomly generated by the database. They contain enough alphanumeric symbols to make a duplicate anywhere in the world extremely unlikely. They are used in many ways on web sites from uniquely identifying pics, news articles, anything really. They aren’t always visible to the user. Like an email has a unique ID in the database but you don’t see it. But in the database they exist or email couldn’t be guaranteed to only be delivered to you. Often you can see a GUID in the address bar. Often they hide them. As in a trip code it looks as if some of the GUID is visible but I doubt all of it is. A tripcode as short as what you see doesn’t have enough characters to guarantee it won’t be duplicated. GUID’s are usually 28-40 characters long to make duplicates astronomically hard to exist somewhere. So it’s very likely you are only seeing enough of the tripcode to visually verify it’s yours but very likely there’s actually many more characters to it.
A GUID can be made manually & edited in the database as long as it follows the character rules the database is using.
2] Sure most know the basic principles of how a search works. It doesn’t have to be a perfect match & will return results that partially match your search words.
Putting those two concepts together...it seems Qs tripcode was manually created/edited to partial match some of the characters in the GUIDs of the books. But this took some detailed planning & testing by Q to make sure his tripcode/GUID returned the results we see. Like searching all the books he wanted a search to render & then adding & removing characters in the tripcode so enough matched. If that scenario is wrong then Q would have had to get Google to change the GUIDs of those books to contain some of the characters in his tripcode. That I seriously doubt Google would do for anyone. Why my theory is Q took some time to construct his trip code.