Privacy

[graveleye]

well.. I like the forum and I like the people here. I tell you what, if it weren't for the folks here I would probably never have joined the NSS and become this caving icon I have become.

I mean that seriously though - I was greeted warmly. You know why? Because I came in with a good heart. If I busted in here and made a big stink and pissed everyone off, I just might have had a bad experience hmmm? Any web forum is what you make of it.

A lot of people have no time to chat on cave forums. My wife for instance, she simply has too much to do than sit around and chat on a DB. Not just this one, but any forum. There are a lot of reasons that people do and don't hang out here. Personally, I found it comfortable here, and these are my friends, so I kept coming back. But really Bill, we've had one serious problem of anonymity in months and probably years and now it's a major problem? Trust some of us who are here daily... it's not a huge problem.

I rather feel like it is a cop-out if someone claims to not want to participate because you don't know exactly who you are talking to. I talk to strangers all day long. It's part of the big world.

Love the Che Hodag avatar btw!!

[wyandottecaver]

Wow. your like freakin kudzu aren't you Bill

Cavechat does not have a bad reputation among most of the cavers I know because they simply don't come here. Problems with anonymous posters, excluding spammers, is essentially never an issue, except apparently, for you. It's called flaming and it happens on the net. Get over it. We don't CARE who the person is. We discuss the issues and move on or drag them out till people get tired of arguing. Most people don't care if it's a smart baboon on the other end of a post. It is discussed on its merit or lack thereof.

Despite your repeated assertion that internet privacy is a myth, there ARE ways to reduce your Google exposure as well as the casual harvester. Yes, a determined person can find out all sorts of stuff..that doesn't make privacy a moot issue. Besides, nicknames are FUN which is the main reason most folks come here BTW. We don't have agendas, we don't have goals, we do often look for information. Mostly its about FUN.

Now, if your interested in being able to take retalitory action against people for disagreeing with you then eliminating anonymous posting certainly aids that. I'm NOT saying thats your reason, only you know that. But frankly, looking at the history of Cavechat there simply aren't any other good ones that came to mind for most members.

As a frequent poster of often controversial and even inflammatory posts I can state with confidence that those who live by the sword die by the sword. If your truly worried about anonymous personal attacks tone down your own rhetoric. Me, I just say what I think and accept that not everybody will like it and they will probably let me know it!.

[cavedoc]

I put my name in my sig line because I think it ought to be there. But I like having my log-in show up because as someone said, it's fun. I can see lots of reasons that someone might not want to put their name, shyness is at the top of my list. So I for one want to preserve the (relative) anonymity on the board. But it seems that a rare person could take advantage of it as happened this past week. Perhaps a tool for the moderators would be a change in the terms of service that allow for anonymity while on good behavior but after a first warning is issued by the moderators, a name must be used for future participation? Not sure if makes things difficult for the moderators or not but it gives them some flexibility and should limit anonymous flaming to one time only for anyone that wants to keep their user name. And if someone just changes addresses and flames again I"m sure that the moderators have the tools for looking at IP addresses etc to deal with it.