Yep. The major alliances have numerous people that essentially have full time jobs running logistics operations (there is no instant travel, you actually have to move goods through often-dangerous space. Also the mechanism for controlling space, "sovereignty," is complex and requires constant maintenance), commanding fleets of hundreds of ships, and performing IT/security for their forum communities.
One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on.
The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.
I wrote an API trawler for Sniggerdly / Pandemic Legion when the API key functionality got released. We tried catching alts and spies that way (applying required giving us their full API key).
Another way to get more info on people was putting images in forum posts and hosting those images on your own server.
One thing that amazed me: since spying and infiltration are real problems, some forum administrators implemented a form of steganography where an algorithm makes imperceptible edits to posts, uniquely for each user, so that when a leak is posted, they can figure out who it was. This was a few years ago, I'm sure by this time a few rounds of counter-measures have been tacked on.
The depth and sophistication of strategy in this game are just way beyond anything else.