in reply to Re^2: Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter
in thread Assigning unique identifiers within a discussion thread to each distinct anonymous commenter
My concerns for “the PerlMonks popularity contest” disappeared years ago, along with any expectation of courtesy.
Sure, there are hundreds ... thousands ... of forums on the net, and every single one of them has spam. Necessarily in every single case except AFAIK this one, that means that there are “spam registered-accounts.” Only PM gives you a completely open input-box attached to every posting, and immediately displays absolutely anything that anyone anywhere types into it. I have never thought this to be a good idea.
However, that is clearly not the central issue that prompted this thread ... nor any of the similar threads including the one I responded-to some time ago.
Some people around here apparently want “Anonymous Monk” postings to be “accountable” in some way ... presumably(?) so that people who are (presumed to be) “hiding behind Anonymous Monk when they want to vent their spleen” will nevertheless get the negative-XP that they (presumably) “deserve.” I dunno. Don’t know, don’t really care. Tempers flare late at night; liquor flows, sometimes. People are people.
My suggestion was, I thought, innocent enough: to flip the process on its head. Instead of trying to track anonymous posters, require people to have an account, and let them choose (or un-choose) to be Anonymous [Monk...] if they want to, for any particular post. (If they want to conceal the fact that they are logged-in, why not.) Don’t let a posting be made if the user isn’t logged-in or if the session has dropped for any reason (as it often inexplicably does). Don’t let a posting, once made, “belong to Nobody” and to be therefore forever out-of-reach. Again, this is a thing that many pieces of forum software do offer.
I’m not trying to change human behaviors here, either. People on this forum are often brilliant programmers, and they are also often exceptionally rude. I’ll take the flies to get the ointment, because that’s what I need this site for. But as for the technical behavior of the site, when a session goes-south and a post therefore vanishes into the gloom unfinished but beyond-reach, that is a computer behavior bug that I would like to see changed.