We could obviously prevent users from changing their name on the message posting form, but that would not prevent a user from changing their site user name or registering additional bogus user accounts to disguise their identity. I'd rather have people change their name on the posting form than signing up for multiple user accounts. And I can think of a number of legitimate reasons why a user would like to hide their identity from the public. However, there's a difference betweeen disguising identity and deliberately misrepresenting identity, and while we would not typically ever reveal the true identity of a poster who was posting under an alias (and there's no reason to believe that we did so in this case... it's likely that all of these names are aliases), it's fair for everyone to know that we do save some basic information with every post that may help us determine whether someone has posted under multiple identities. It's not something that we are actively checking, but it's there for a rare case like this. I only post this because some people may post "anonymously" under the illusion that they will be completely anonymous to SOT, and that may or may not be the case.
--Slade
to post a reply:
login - or -
register