Re:: Post-Posting Etiquette

[boo_radley]

django says :

The probably best way of proving that you have no integrity, is to post anonymously. Take responsibility for what you write! Necessary corrections are part of that responsibility.

Let's finally dismiss the idea that posting with a registered username has anything to do with integrity, or honesty, or anything else. I'm sure you were around to see vroom and tye shake out the votebots and multiple user ids (hi, eliza! hi slurpee machine!), but you're still willing to put more credibility into a pseudonymous post than an anonymous post? I don't think that makes much sense at all.

perlmonks has an entirely different anonymous community than slashdot, which seems to be the primary source of the 'anonymous posters aren't to be trusted' line of thinking. Perlmonks is not slashdot. There have been many intelligent and insightful posts that come from people who don't want to be identified with a particular user id, or, for that matter, don't care to be identified at all.
Don't hate them just because they're anonymous, mmkay?

[dmmiller2k]

I agree with the sentiment that posting anonymously does not necessarily imply lack of integrity (or of any other positive quality). Sometimes it merely signifies that the poster happens to be using a machine configured to refuse cookies, as was the case with a recent consulting client of mine.

Not that I actually posted anything, being so busy on that particular contract assignment, but had I tried to do so, it would have been anonymous.

(This particular company had configured its proxy server to somehow authenticate based on the user's NT login credentials, Internet Explorer being the only supported browser. Absent multi-level approval, consultants were not given any outside access through the proxy/firewall, the process for obtaining which would have taken longer than the term of my contract (assuming a suitable business reason could be concocted). Because access to certain sites was occasionally required by my job description, my manager opted to (illegally) provide me with his NT login. Since the firm used NT roaming profiles, every cookie I produced would eventually find its way onto the his machine. Also, everything was heavily tracked and logged, etc. A nightmarish environment I'm glad I'm no longer part of. But I digress.)

Just as Perl itself (unlike Java, C++ and other C-like languages) provides no comprehensive facilities for restricting users of any particular facility (e.g., module or class) to a set of rules (a la strong type-checking), instead being satisfied with specifying guidelines which, when followed, will produce desired behavior; so too on PerkMonks, posting anonymously does not necessarily imply a lack of trustworthiness, regardless of the number of less-than-credible posts which may have been made anonymously.

In even more other words, just because most (or maybe even all?) unscrupulous posts are made anonymously, does not prove that all anonymous posts are unscrupulous.

dmm