TypeDrawers is a forum for professional designers to have professional discussions. To encourage thoughtful discourse at an adult level users are required to use their real names as user names. You may use a trade name that obviously identifies you. Examples of an obviously identifiable trade name would be Yanone, KLTF, or Chank. Do not use the name of your business if your business is not obviously the business of one person. A user who posts under an alias will be warned to change his/her user name. Users who insist on posting under an alias will be banned. Please capitalize names and separate your personal and family names with spaces.
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Roger Excoffon, being dead, probably won’t mind that I nuked his unconfirmed account on general principle.
So before I get deleted, I try at least to explain:
I am happy to let everyone I talk to in an online forum know who I am. In fact, I would find it pointless to engage anonymously in a discussion here. But:
Most of the discussions as well as the profile pages of Typedrawers are publicly available. It means that everything I say here can be easily searched, indexed, collected and used by every person or company who knows my name. Today and forever. And I have no control over this whatsoever.
And that’s why I abbreviated my name. It’s just a little garden fence protection for my privacy. I didn’t fake my user name. I just shortened it. (And I guess 95% of the users here know my last name anyway)
And following the news of the latest months, a little concern about online privacy is certainly not a crazy idea.
So there are two options:
1) Don't mind that guy and just delete him.
2) Offer a way to protect the user’s real names.
It’s a standard feature of forum software to generate the HTML output depending on the status of the user as guest or logged-in user. The real names could easily be hidden or shortened, when guests visit the forum. Through this, the forum would appear as usual for every logged-in user, but people and search engines outside of this forums would not be able to connect names and posts.
Or the simple hack: Allow pseudonyms or shortened names and just open up a page or discussion thread not visible to guests where the real names are given.
I actually like the idea of a “real names only forum” very much, but without privacy options for those names the price is too high for me. So if something like 2) is possible, that would be great, if not, I would have to accept 1).
I like this idea a lot.
I think the argument for real names is similar to your argument against them. They should make users accountable for the things they say here, hopefully resulting in a more thoughtful, respectful, and honest discourse. If you're truly afraid of the internet, you might want to reconsider participating in it.
Since I'm just trying to play my roll as a moderator, I'll let Father James chime in.
Then there is just one choice left: Please delete my account.
All the best, guys! (Yes, seriously, not sarcastically.)