What
Everyone has an IP address. Many services, websites and other devices alike, utilize this address to identify your device.
You know, for stuff like servers, individual players joining a server, IP bans...
This is the same for local networks. Your router needs to have some way to identify your specific device among multiple connected to it.
Public IP addresses can not give out your exact location.
With some services, you can only get an approximate (not quite close) point around wherever you actually reside, as they more or less request the ISP associated to it for this information.
This IP address is given to you by your ISP, so if you're concerned about concealing your
approximate location, it might be on your best interest to contact them.
To respond to title... It depends.
- For SRB2 specifically, the game exposes your IP address when you host (otherwise how can other players join?), and it exposes your address to the server if you're joining a game (other clients can't see it, however).
This is actually done by literally any game implementing online features. They just have varying degrees of hiding it from plain view.
- For this message board... All forum software keeps IP addresses for multiple reasons.
- The most obvious one is banning. When an user has shown they excel in being a nuisance, staff with banning power are able to issue an IP ban to the offending user. This is needed to make sure the offending user is unable to register with a different account and continue their shenanigans. Obviously, it's not perfect...
- Then there's the master server.
- The most obvious one here is to keep track of what games are available.
It would be quite hard to identify what game belongs to what device and point SRB2 to connect to the right thing if there were no addresses, wouldn't you say?
- There's also the server log.
The server log keeps track of a number of games that have been previously hosted. This is imperative so that offending servers that think "yeah, dehosting should prevent a ban :)" can be swiftly dealt with.
If you plan on stop playing SRB2 due to your IP being exposed... you might want to consider stopping playing online games altogether.
Besides... photo evidence of what? Normally you offer a subject when you request proof.
