Anonymous contacts

General Discussion
1

An increasing number of the contacts created in my Mautic Pro are marked “Anonymous”.

No, I don not mean that they lack a name or identity. They even lack an IP address. Such a row in the “Contacts” list (with Search command “is:anonymous” set) lacks any type of identification and is annotated with the name “Anonymous”.



Is this a problem? Yes, because each of them is given a new ID.

When I sort the un-identified contacts by “Name” then they are certainly not sorted by any algorithm I can figure out. A typical snipplet may look lilke this:

Quote:
217.214.149.66 Sweden 1 66 days ago 257
83.252.51.133 Sweden 0 62 days ago 3585
Anonymous 0 41 days ago 3841
103.68.22.243 India 0 17 days ago 4097

As you can see they are not sorted in alphabetical order, nor in numerical order by IP address. The "Anonymous" record appears at a seemingly random position in the list.

What does this tell me? They are sorted by some field that is not visible to me.
This leads me to conclude two things:
1) There is information stored in the database that is concealed from me; how, otherwise, could this sort order appear at all (computers are logical; if you ask them to sort, they will do so. Here they obviously have sorted by some other parameter than by name)
2) It is not possible for an HTTP request to be made sucessfull w/o the source revealing it's IP address. HTTP is based on TCP, which requires a handshake before any conversation. The handshake reveals the caller's IP. So why is this information hidden from us?

Why and to what end does Mautic conceal known information regarding an not-yet-identified Contact?
2

An increasing number of the contacts created in my Mautic Pro are marked “Anonymous”.
No, I don not mean that they lack a name or identity. They even lack an IP address. Such a row in the “Contacts” list (with Search command “is:anonymous” set) lacks any type of identification and is annotated with the name “Anonymous”.

Is this a problem? Yes, because each of them is given a new ID.
When I sort the un-identified contacts by “Name” then they are certainly not sorted by any algorithm I can figure out. A typical snipplet may look lilke this:

[quote]217.214.149.66 Sweden 1 66 days ago 257
83.252.51.133 Sweden 0 62 days ago 3585
Anonymous 0 41 days ago 3841
103.68.22.243 India 0 17 days ago 4097[/quote]

As you can see they are not sorted in alphabetical order, nor in numerical order by IP address. The “Anonymous” record appears at a seemingly random position in the list.

What does this tell me? They are sorted by some field that is not visible to me.
This leads me to conclude two things:

  1. There is information stored in the database that is concealed from me; how, otherwise, could this sort order appear at all (computers are logical; if you ask them to sort, they will do so. Here they obviously have sorted by some other parameter than by name)
  2. It is not possible for an HTTP request to be made sucessfull w/o the source revealing it’s IP address. HTTP is based on TCP, which requires a handshake before any conversation. The handshake reveals the caller’s IP. So why is this information hidden from us?

Why and to what end does Mautic conceal known information regarding an not-yet-identified Contact?