It’s entirely up to the individual to decide how much of themselves that they want to disclose.
Only the foolish would be unable to grasp that where the modern information world stands on privacy. There is no public embargo on anything you share on-line.
And it’s a widespread fallacy that you have much of a private life, if indeed you have any. People who know me know more about me than ever I would dare to solicit from them even if I were blind drunk, and certainly more than I think I know about myself, most of which is hopelessly wrong.
Fortunately social convention generally discourages bean-spilling. If everyone did it there would no illusion of ‘privacy’.
I think those in charge are selling themselves short. It’s not the fact that full names are shown which creates the (generally) civilised atmosphere here, it’s the thoughtful, open, even-handed and fair moderation.
This is so true. I’m totally against having to put our names up on line as it goes against all the ‘safe internet use’ protocols as I understand them. No other forum I use insists on real names and they go between rude people and very polite people, it is the overall forum etiquitte (and moderators and admins responses) that decides on this.
I was also given the choice of putting my name or trotting on and as I feel this is one of the most useful France sites I decided that I would suck it up and comply. I don’t agree, as internet privacy is very important and I don’t think that putting our real names covers the basic safe internet rules, however even though I don’t agree it is the owners choice to insist on it. I use a number of forums (of all different subjects - cloth nappies to chickens!) and this is the only one that insists on names. I don’t think it changes anything in terms of behaviour. People will be arses if they want to regardless of their names, it is only moderation / administration that changes the vibe / acceptable content of any forum. I was also given the choice to leave when I questioned the ‘rules’ but I’d like to use the site as I feel it is one of the best French forums that we have at the moment. Luckily in France my maiden name is the legal name even if it is not my ‘nom de usage’ so I feel I’m protecting my privacy while complying with Cat and James rules, men perhaps don’t have the same options to comply with the rules here and protect their own internet privacy.
One is that contributors have different experiences of social media platforms, and
The other is the confusion between our individual and collective behaviour and that of giant internet corporations.
On the first problem - my experience has very definitely been that anonymity lowers the tone of discussion - particularly in areas like politics and economics - and Tory’s last comment about her experience of forums from ‘cloth nappies to chickens’ perhaps reveals the reason for the different experiences we bring. The answer lies - as always - in looking for some evidence beyond anecdote. This study, for example, found that although anonymity had no direct effect, it did indeed lower the tone of discussions: ‘users’ conformity to an aggressive social norm of commenting is stronger in an anonymous environment’. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305116664220
On the second problem - which is the general one of giant internet corporations harvesting data and storing it on servers in America, selling it, etc - I agree it should be curtailed - but this is a problem to be addressed through political action, and our behaviour as commercial consumers (by not using Google or other corporations whose business model depends on collecting data, by ad blocks, etc).
It would help, James, if you could answer the original question.
Why, when registering to use the site, do you ask people for a ‘nom-de-plume’ as well as their actual name?
Then you show both on postings.
Why?
Probably because there is a method within Discourse (the forum software) for bringing a post to the attention of an individual user - add an “@” to their user name - so @Bosendorfer for instance and they will be sent the post as an email.
It’s a bit more focussed than just replying to someone’s post - and it can be someone other than the author of a post to which you are responding.
But, obviously, it helps to know the user name as well as the full name to make use of that feature.
I didn’t see that question in the OP but @anon88169868 answers it below. Basically, it’s easier to tag people with a short name. The software also allows removal of the real name field in which case you would see only the short name. But we don’t remove it on SF.
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