advocating anonymity at the introduction to a community is a step backwards. in a nice community the first thing everybody does is learn the strangers name, introduce themselves and give warning about old grumpy gramps.

i see no difference in actual level of anonymity between using Anonymous and using SomeOtherName, if you don't post your real-life info you're just as anonymous.

Anonymous for questions from passing-thru visitors is great but extended hiding behind Anonymous has no advantage over creating ImInABitchyMood for when you don't want to post as yourself. in fact it would be much more pleasant to admire and enjoy ImInABitchyMood when they post if they provided consistant material.

instead, Anonymous is used as a dumping ground for things you don't want to say yourself. i doubt this helps the occasional random visitor's experience as they take their turn as Anonymous.

if you must be not yourself, be NotYourself. if you must be whatever, be Whatever. let Anonymous be left for the exclusive use of strangers who are asked to at least come up with AnyOldName if they intend to hang around.

i would much rather have tilly's Anonymous posts collected together as RandomUserNobodyKnowsIsTilly and know that that person had a collection of insight worth reading through (at least to check the titles). now all those gems are lost in Anonymousland only ever to be seen by random stumbling upon or by somebody directly linking them somewhere else. a sad loss.

in the other communities i've visited most require picking a name before posting and if they're not quite perlmonks it's not because of not having Anonymous it's from not having all the RealPeople that habit the monestary. and i do exclude Anonymous from that calculation.

use of Anonymous creates dead nodes that can't be updated without intervention from above. if you find you misspoke or presented bad advice you can't go back and add an update or a pointer to the answer you finally found.

so yes i believe use of the Anonymous shield is noise and that the noise is drowning out the worthy part of Anonymous' signal and you should get your own name (they're free y'know).

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