Comments on: What’s in a name? Membership? I think not.

By: Dr Small

Dr Small — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 01:16:49 +0000

It seems to me, that something similar to this was written back in the early 1990′s, and submitted to text-files.com

http://php.8ez.com/drsmall/blog/?p=74

Dr Small

By: Luke

Luke — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 23:48:19 +0000

It’s kinda silly to require this – it’s not like they can verify if the name you use is a real one. I guess what they really meant was to ask people not to use silly nicknames like “SerialKiller”, “DarkRapist”, “Dragonslayer” and etc… Perhaps they want to have the names so that they can credit the beta testers somewhere and they want to avoid names like “LongDongSilver” in the official acknowledgments or something.

But yeah – it seems that they didn’t really think about privacy concerns when requiring this. Note that these days everyone has a myspace facebook and myspace account where they tend to post tons of very personal information without any regard for their own privacy or privacy of others whose pictures they post, tag and comment on.

So I guess it’s not surprising that if someone essentially lives public life via their social networks, live journal and picture sharing sites, then they will think nothing of requiring others to reveal some private information.

By: bapoumba

bapoumba — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 14:35:33 +0000

Agreed.

When I first started writing on the UWN, I signed with my nick. That was changed to my real name (more that a year ago, with a different team). It did puzzle me at first, there was no connection prior to this even, and I decided to let it go.
I probably should not have, thinking of it thanks to the u-w mailing list thread and your post. Choice should be available. These are projects taking place on the Internet, and nick are our identity there. Linking the two should not be mandatory.