Yah... That used to be me... I try to keep in touch, dip my toe in the pool every year or so, go to the conventions and such. Almost 10 years ago I wrote my alliances auth system in Ruby on Rails, included those identicons you see as the old default profile pictures on github as the avatars on the internal forum and you couldent change then. The reason for this was that the token for the icon was your name and the posters mashed together so if a screenshot leaked we could reverse lookup who said what.

We never actually caught any spies with that, but that was the level of paranoia and planning that went into a crappy mid-sized group, in the game of today there are actual armies of 10k angry nerds. They are much more casual about it though, which is healthier for the players.