Scripsit Andy Dingley:
None. It is not my problem if other people fall below the minimal level
of decent behavior.
Of course.
However when did anonymity on Usenet become "indecent" (of itself)?
It has a long track record, several valid justifications, and wide
acceptance. Your frequent criticism of it has no real justification.
It has been abused in the past (hence the demise of anon.penet.fi,
which I'm sure you remember), but that's not closely relevant to our
context of text-based Usenet.
I simply point out that cowards who make personal
attacks hiding behind forged names and addresses should not be trusted.
I simply fail to see the connection between anonymity and "cowardice".
If you don't like personal attacks, then I doubt you like them any
more if the author is identifiable.
I have no provable idea if your real name is "Jukka Korpela". For all
I know you're a Japanese teenager named Neko, who only posts to Usenet
in the hope of attracting simpleton truck drivers. However if you do
have photos of yourself in Cosplay outfits, please keep them to
yourself just in case. Your "real world" identity is an irrelevance -
your "real" (i.e. virtual) identity for my only purposes is as a
generator of NNTP traffic with a particular header line at the top.
Now that's fine - I don't care if you're a Finnish academic, a
teenager or a Perl script. I judge your "merit" (including any
cowardice or lack of) by the content of your posts and the consistency
of the identifying header.
The fact that _your_ header (and mine) has the form of a real-world
name is of no matter to me. It implies no more "worth" to your posts
than dorayme's, rf's or even Bullis' (we pity Bullis for his
consistently inane content, not his inconsistent handle).
So you think you would get less spam or would get trolled less often if
you lied about your _name_? You might wish to know that E-mail works on
the basis of addresses, not names.
I would certainly be trolled less. For one thing I doubt very much if
I'd receive threats of physical violence on my doorstep without it
(BTW Celtic King, I'm still waiting for you to show up).
Oddly I do tend to follow your own name practice when it comes to my
email address. I use one very public, very heavily spammed address.
Filtering it is tiresome (if you aren't whitelisted, it's probably not
reliable), but at least I only have to do it once.
