In reply to William.

William,

It’s proven time and time again that anonymity elicits trolling. If you have ever worked for a media company and confronted this issue, you will understand it from that perspective. If not, you’re only seeing it from the participants view.

I clearly understand the dynamics of free speech here in the U.S. and limits to that speech elsewhere. But I don’t live there, I live here, and that’s my first priority. Not that I don’t want to discourage others to have their right to their opinion, but when you have anonymity you can take liberties you wouldn’t normally take and do things you wouldn’t normally do if you had to do it under your real name. That’s why people sometimes wear masks at protests, because they don’t want their identities revealed for the reasons you state. If they want to wear a mask and protest peacefully, that’s a shame and I wish no one had to succumb to that pressure. But if they do wear a mask and break windows and through Molotov cocktails, then that’s not right.

I would love to be able to say to you, “sure, let’s them them all post anonymously.” And if everyone were able to, there would be no indication for anyone to measure the validity or the truthfulness of that statement.

Nowhere in society is there a safe place to post anything anyway. Wherever you post, it’s going to be hard for you to do it anonymously unless you always log in as someone else. Even then, if that person is questioned and they say they shared their user/pass with you you’re going to be found out.

You can scrape the bottom of the barrel and few people may ever be caught, but that’s because they were able to completely avoid tracking in every way.

But let’s get back to WP Tavern. The site emanates from the U.S. and must follow U.S. established law. Most company lawyers would be loathe to allow anonymous posts because of liability concerns. Most Moderators of this forum and others are not professionally trained moderators. They most likely wouldn’t know where the line is between something that should be removed or not and someone with anonymity could sue a company for removing posts without a clearly explicit policy limiting that person’s right to speak. So enabling non-anonymity, while disabling some peoples right to speak freely behind a fake likeness or image, causes all sorts of problems that are more easily handled by enforcing a visible public image.

I have seen time and time again online trolls disrupt conversations, threaten others, and otherwise diminish the conversation. Once you allow it, people can’t seem to behave themselves and others shouldn’t be subjected to linguistic violence by keyboard. They have as much right to know who is trolling them then the trolls have in harassment and bullying.