I remember going to SD back in the day and the grimy trader could tell me ports that someone else used. Then I could hunt or track them down.

My questions are;
Is this still the case?
And if so, how does one avoid having the grimy trader tell people where we have ported?

Still can track people via Grimy. Having control of the sector with a personal/Corp fighter will prevent Grimy reporting on you. However, I think, it’s still a useful yet expensive data mining tool to use after an aggressive gridding run.

I heard re-naming my ship also works to evade the grimy trader :/

One hint : you can name all your ships differently but sleep in a ship that never has ported or is renamed something new.

Just one way to avoid Grimmy.

Curious :

If you have a Windows p/w that has to be renewed every month or whatever, you can renew it with the same p/w as the old one (great if you suffer from senior moments like me).

If the shipname was TMM, port away all day, go SD, 'change' registration to TMM, does that clean the porting record?

According to Slice, Grimy looks up what ship number (not name) the trader is currently in and gives you a list of ports where that ship has docked. If this is true then changing the name of your ship will not help. You would need to sleep in a different ship than you normally trade in.

Slice was great way back when, but that was even before the HVS version, and much of what he wrote no longer applies. Some does, perhaps what you posted is still correct. Slice TW Manual link below, some of the differences from the current TW2002 are very obvious.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080516092 ... ice-10.txt

NOTE: Edit was after Deign's post below.

Perhaps Slice is incorrect on this. A quick way to check would be to trade at a port, reregister your ship with a new name, then dock at the port again. Compare the name the port gives for the previous ship to dock there. If its docking record has the new name of your ship then it is recording your ship number and not the name, and it would be doubtful that simply renaming your ship would make any difference.

No it would not , if you have TWGS go into T-edit and check a port you have traded at , see the name .. changing it from TMM and again to TMM will have only cost you credits and nothing more .. safety was not achieved.