it's an entropy thing.
Give me a break. That's ridiculous. You've apparently fallen into the trap of using a term you only partially understand to describe an unrelated process which you also only partially understand. Your implied analogy is broken anyway.
Disorder on this site is not increasing. And if it were, it wouldn't be due to the existence of Anonymous Monk. AM posts, I'd bet, maintain a pretty consistent percentage of all posts. (Though that percentage is likely to be much higher than normal in a thread such as this one where AM posting is being attacked directly.)
As I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you can't eliminate anonymous posting. At least, you can't on an open site. As you aren't arguing that Perl Monks should start requiring a birth certificate and social security number (or equivalent for countries other than the U.S.) you aren't really suggesting that we do away with anonymous posting.
You just want to do away with the Anonymous Monk. You want every post to be tied to an account. But, if you think that would dampen the noise somehow, you are making all kinds of wrong assumptions. It would increase the noise.
Instead of posts by Anonymous Monk, which you can look at and know immediately are posted anonymously, we'd have posts by the likes of MonkAnonymous, jim_dandy, JohnQMonk, and snowhuoue. And you'd have to go check each of their homenodes before you realized that each only wrote one node and then vanished.
Worse, since a troll has to create a quickie troll account anyway, he might just decide to pick something more trollish like, for instance, zengargoy1e or zengragoyle, or zengarqoyle. Or all three.
That kind of stuff happens constantly on some other sites and message boards. It is minimal here. Almost absent. I wouldn't want to change that.
Finally, raising the "barrier to entry" (if you can abuse terms from physics, I can abuse terms from economics) will slow the growth of the community.
Scenario: someone happens upon this site, sees an interesting question that he might answer, finds that he can't without first creating account, and moves on to do something else forgetting about perlmonks entirely. Farfetched? Hardly. Had Anonymous Monk not existed, that would probably have described my first brush with PM. Instead, I answered the question and came back later. Soon thereafter, I created an account.
-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
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