Yeah, reasonable means of discretion in recognition is the problem here. Personally, I don't think it's something that should be solved from the board software side.
To me, it seems like the best solution would be some kind of firefox-plugin, which lets you "bookmark" certain tripcodes and assign your own colours or whatever to them.
>>32
and add comments that show when you hover over the text?
>>32
Agreed, but the question here is "what CAN we do on the server-side to help".
The original question was rather academic, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
Last I looked at PGP, what they did was rather interesting. To auth a fingerprint with someone, you can either (presumably by phone, as long as you're satisfied) read out the many hex digits, or take a wordlist form.
There's about 32 hex digits, and they suck, so what they did was produce a dictionary for a few hundred two and three-syllable words. You map sequential chunks of the fingerprint bitstring onto these words to get about 20 words. These words are also special in that they alternate between two/three letters, so if someone tells you two two-syllable or two three-syallable words in a row, you know there's an error (very clever error-detection method).
Now, twenty words isn't exactly convenient as a tripcode, but as a method of generating/representing a hash, it could be something interesting to think about. Hotaru's method looks kinda fun.
As Waha also originally stated, another concern is about getting tripcodes that are "close enough" to fool other people. One of the dangers of even longer tripcodes is complacency. Take SSH fingerprints as an example. Noone really ever checks the full fingerprint to verify a server, but we often check the first and last few hex digits, right?
There is software out there that can hammer away at a known fingerprint and the longer you give it, the closer it gets to a desired fingerprint that looks a lot like the machine you want to masquerade as. This is not a trivial threat, and it should be obvious from this that longer tripcodes are probably more dangerous than the security they provide.