Very few things are an unmixed blessing. Anonymous Monk is not without its drawbacks. There are the occasional cowardly swipes made by registered users switching to anonymity for the purpose of making the swipe. There are the occasional swipes made by visitors who have never registered (I can't say that with total certainty, of course, but I feel quite sure of it). There are also lots of good nodes written by anonymous users (many of whom have never registered) and lots of good users who wouldn't have joined if we had tried to force them to register from the beginning.

i do applaud you for your plans not to use Anonymous

I've written several nodes anonymously. A couple because I was discussing sensitive material that I didn't want tracked back to me (I'm not registered as anything like 'wizard toto' so writing something under my usual login connects it with me personally, not just within the "walls" of PerlMonks).

Some were quite critical of my employer or former employer. Even posting anonymously, I didn't feel it appropriate to name the employer and I never mention who I work for when on-line (I've seen too many people get into trouble as a result of such). But I didn't want my employer to one day get curious about what I'm doing on-line and find a node with my name on it being critical of them (even though I don't name them). Employers can be total jerks in such situations.

I started writing this node using my usual login and then realized that I didn't even want to admit to having been critical of my employer using that name. So you get another anonymous reply.

No, I don't want to register a different name to put all of my "not quite so closely associated with me" nodes. For one thing, that would make it easier to figure out that that batch of nodes was written by me (more evidence to correlate). I don't want to work that hard, either. And I don't want to "waste" a username. And I'd feel deceptive hiding behind a different name (and yet it'd help defeat the purpose to even note that the other name was an alias).

I've also written anonymous nodes just to be funny (there are lots of reasons that one joke or another might be funnier anonymously rather than "from me"). I've also written anonymous nodes expressing a personal opinion that I didn't wish to make "public" except anonymously.

And I think I did make one anonymous swipe. I wish I hadn't, but I'm glad I haven't done that often or recently.

So, obviously, I'm not one more to add to your list. I'd certainly like to see fewer people willing to use AnonyMonk to make immature swipes (but I don't see this problem as being a big deal, at least not yet). I'd also like to see fewer registered users making immature swipes. :)

And I'm glad we have AnonyMonk, despite the warts. It is still very much a net win on my tally sheet.

Respectfully,
me

very good, you've covered about everything. when you posted that critical post, what would have happened if minutes later you realized you let something slip that you really shouldn't have. like way too many people might get the Mr. BigWig reference or there's a paragraph that you missed during proofreading that identifies you to the people you were critical of.

if you had created a user (even throwaway) you could fix, and in the time it takes to get the password email you might have lightened it up a bit. count to 10 before posting.

what if after the first reply to your post another Anonymous had started to twist and contort what you had said to make it look even worse (or had started profusely appologizing for what you had said)?

if it's CYA it should be done well.

i do tend to think worst case sometimes (makes whatever happens milder)...

if you were here for the first time again, knowing very little about Perl, how could you trust what Anonymous was telling you (even if it was correct) if two posts down Anonymous is being a trollish jerk? the inexperienced newbie isn't helped by wisdom from Anonymous.

what happens when the next blogfordollars spamming script comes out and has perlmonks in it's list because you can post here with no preparation?

but i hadn't thought of the funny parts, or Meditations and Poetry and such.

i'm sure nothing bad will make ever make it to the front page, but i wonder if someday there will be too much of the bad for the monks who keep the monestary safe to handle.

this possibly irrational fear of the DOS aspects that anonymous allows is probably what has kept me in this thread with my whining because i think it's a very important aspect to consider.

that's what i've seen in the past, abuse has to be cleaned up by somebody, there are rarely enough somebodys to keep up with the abuse, something that nobody wanted to do has to be done because there's no other way to keep things working.

my final evil plan would go something like:

• new sessions get Anon . $UNIQ
• if they take the cookie (permanent or not) it stays theirs for as long as they can keep track of it and use it (see cleanup below)
• if while they have the cookie they give email then it's just like a current account, get password/homenode but homenode can't be linked except by node_id (may change Anon name later)
• if they're here this far they'll have the option of changing their name sometime in the future, but only once (no links to AnonXXX but links to Name). they would probably change their name when they gave email, but could keep AnonXXX name if they liked.
• Anon users get cleaned up, no post for 6mo, year, whatever, posts get moved to Anonymous. this may or may not be needed.

a little rough here and there, but casual browsers notice that they're Anon43851, if they come back and they kept cookie they notice they're still same. they can edit their posts (good thing or bad thing), if one proves trollish they can be chastized or ignored or whatever.

i do realize that alot of monks like the use of Anonymous, but using it is i think giving up something they don't think about at the time (yes, another presumption). they're giving up something like parentage. they can't protect the virtue and integrity of what they've posted because they abandoned it to the owner Anonymous instead of just another anonymous.

but i have thought about this too much for now, it's making my brain hurt.

actully now that i've been to the store and back there might already be in place some sort of cookie mechanism to allow Anonymous to edit their posts, i'm just assuming that Anonymous can't edit their posts once posted. that might even be a good feature to add if it isn't there.

would it be less presumptious to say 'the 5 monks who want nothing ever to change, the 10 monks who don't want to implement the change, the 15 monks who are ideologicaly opposed to the change and the 6 monks who habit Anonymous'?

Well, not much (at least, assuming you phrased it in a way that made it seem like you actually thought those numbers meant something), but it would be less asinine, since you wouldn't be making a blanket assertion that everybody who disagrees with you is doing so for the worst and most self-serving of possible reasons. Myself, I didn't downvote the original node because I felt it had been hit hard enough, but I did downvote the node under discussion here, because I felt it to be a pointless ad-hominem attack.

And in answer to your second question, yes, I believe it is generally considered less of a presumptuous act to assume (in the absence of any evidence in either direction) that people are acting from reasonable and moral motives than to assume the contrary. But this is neither here nor there: nobody but you has imputed a motivation to the downvoters of the original node beyond "they thought it was a bad idea"—their reasons for thinking it a bad idea may be presumed to vary. Especially given that many of them have in fact expressed such (varying) reasons elsewhere in this thread.

that's true, i had started and was stuck way down in a subthread and hadn't scanned the whole thread. i was thinking the discussion was about disallowing Anonymous posting replies anywhere rather than disallowing Anonymous from posting replies to a particualr thread at the whim of the OP. the second i can be seeing more worthy of diverse downvoting. the first is merely policy, the second is censorship/discrimination/icky mea culpa

the first is merely policy, the second is censorship/discrimination/icky

Considering that the first is far more restrictive than the second, (not allowed to reply at all, vs not allowed to reply sometimes), I find this highly peculiar.

OTOH, so what? Slapping "censorship" or "discrimination" onto something is easy, and shows you really are from now. But if disallowing anonymous replies in certain threads is "censorship" or "discrimination", what is considering notes then? What about the actions of Nodereaper? What about not frontpaging a node that's about "how to enjoy cranberry sauce in your sex games"? What about not answering CGI or Windows related questions? And, when it comes to non-perlmonks examples, what about running a spam filter? Or a firewall? Those could easily be labelled as "censorship" and "discrimination" as well, but so what?

Abigail