14th Doc and Sokar

14thDoc is trolling Sokar with the old "I know your real name" schtick. I've PM'ed him and said one more time gets him banned. Sokar has never posted his real name here and Doc seems to have gotten it from Facebook.

And this is why the concept that anything that is available for anyone to see on the internet is "private".

It isn't and people know it anyway and it doesn't stop them from spreading it around privately so everyone knows anyway.

We end up with this stupidity and endless shenanigans trying to protect the unprotectable.

I think there's a difference between personal information that is disclosed for public use and merely that which is available to a clever researcher. I'm sure if a very skilled investigator gathered all the posts any of us made here, he could take the totality of that information to discover any of our real life identities. Heck, knowing your profession, your approximate age, and what town you live in would probably narrow it down enough!

But I'd still consider one's real-life identity to be private information. There's this belief that to be private, it MUST be secret. I think this is wrong. There are situations where one has an expectation of privacy. On this board, it's because the owner has said he will deal harshly with people who abuse RL information. The owner can't prevent RL information from being recklessly spread elsewhere, but he can guarantee that it won't be tolerated here.

I've always seen it as also being a matter of respect for the staff on the board.

We are all volunteers here, if someone wants to try and create headaches by continually playing on the line of the rules then why should we have to waste our energy dealing with them.

If Reddit, a site with several orders of magnitude more users than we have, can manage to implement the same no personal information policy we have, I think we can continue to do so.