User:74-95-43-249H

Who am I?

Hello. I've been creating and editing Wikipedia articles since Wikipedia was founded; I was initially solicited for articles via the usenet newsgroups I used to frequent (most notably rec.food.drink.beer; alt.beer; and sci.skeptic). Early on I created an account in my name, but didn't connect it with an email address for privacy reasons. Then I didn't use the account for a couple of years, forgot the password (which must have been a really good one!), and because of the lack of email was never able to reopen the account.

Thereafter, I mostly participated in Wikipedia via DNS number for several years. This was occasionally an annoyance when edits were sometimes summarily pulled by monitors inclined to suspect all DNS editors of ill intent. So, I attempted to register a new username account, but every name I tried that was meaningful to me was either already taken and abandoned (and therefore unrecoverable), or rejected by whatever arcane system Wikipedia uses to determine unacceptable usernames. So I gave up and went back to DNS numbers for several more years.

However, as an "unregistered user" (illegal alien?), some Wikipedia features are denied me, so I am making one more attempt to participate as a registered user. I am reluctant, however, to completely start over and lose credit for the hundreds, perhaps thousands of contributions I've made to Wikipedia over the years, so I chose a username that reflects the DNS number under which I've made the bulk of my contributions in recent years.

So who am I? I am known in most other web fora as "Dr H" (which Wikipedia rejects), formerly known here as DNS 74.95.43.249, and for a while as DNS 70.89.176.249. Most, if not all contributions you see under any of those identifiers, from 2004 onward, are by me, for better or worse. I guess we'll see how this goes, moving forward.

Yee haw.