Protected forums anonymous

[child of the night 271]

This may have been brought up before but I have yet to see it.

 

I was thinking that perhaps the protected forums could have a sort of switch to make the person anonymous if they want. While there are people who want to use it I feel that there are people who can't because they don't want what they say to be attributed to their words. I was just thinking about this because I have some things that if I wanted to talk about I wouldn't want other people to attribute it to me...

[Dusk shine 37]

Cool idea I wold like that too

[Jeric 46,851]

I could see this being a great idea for Life Advice (particularly for OP's), but not so great for Debate Pit. Anonymous posting makes some people gain 'digital courage' they otherwise would not have and since that forum has a stricter policy on content and replies, I see that ending badly. Users would become upset at increased warnings and bans if the proven psychology plays out, and Staff would be targeted at limiting free speech when they enforce the rules in there.

 

But I'm a big proponent for 'putting you name on it' anyway.

[child of the night 271]

I could see this being a great idea for Life Advice (particularly for OP's), but not so great for Debate Pit. Anonymous posting makes some people gain 'digital courage' they otherwise would not have and since that forum has a stricter policy on content and replies, I see that ending badly. Users would become upset at increased warnings and bans if the proven psychology plays out, and Staff would be targeted at limiting free speech when they enforce the rules in there.

But I'm a big proponent for 'putting you name on it' anyway.

Just as a reference back to when I was writing this, I had seen that life advice was protected. At the time I hadn't realized that the debate section was protected and so I didn't take that into account. So this was really only for the life advice section.

[Jokuc 8,173]

This has been brought up 5+ times since we introduced the Life Advice section and to summarize: There's a slight worry that users may end up abusing the system (which I personally don't believe would happen nor be an issue), a feature for IPB to create anonymous threads do exist, but if we were to implement such a feature we must be able to limit it to that section only,

Moderators would need to be able to see post identity and it should not interfere with the current forum permissions (member and post requirements).

 

I assume that this requires the developers to code everything from scratch for this to happen and since this has been brought up many times over a long period of time without result, I'd say that it's not something we'll see anytime soon unless Jeric decides to get a whip and make those devs get some heavy work done.

 

I'd also like to say that I agree with what Feld0 said on this matter a few years ago:

If you are so embarrassed about what it is you want to share that you aren't willing to attach your online identity to it, you might want to reconsider sharing it at all. There are agencies that dedicate themselves to dealing with personal issues anonymously which may be in a better position to help you out than a My Little Pony fan forum.