As is the claim that removing anonymous posting would improve matters. And since this is all speculation, I want to point out that there is no a priori reason to believe things will go only in one direction.

first, the signal to noise was me i think. second try this little though experiment.

take all of tilly's posts and change the owner to Anonymous. better or worse for perlmonks.

take all of tilly's anonymous posts (if there are any) and change their ownership to Interloper. better or worse.

i claim the second is preferable and asking a regular user to remember a name and password is not asking much.

things change, years ago i would have thumbed my nose at any place that required me to jump through any hoops to post. years ago when you ordered food at a fast food place they didn't ask if you wanted it super sized (i would tell you if i did thank you much) or if you want an apple pie with that. now they can be fired if the don't ask. it pisses me off to no end. times change. people adapt.

create a Lobby area, anonymous and those who wish to remain so can confine their postings there. all they must do to enter the inner chamber is give a name.

there's always intertia against any change. i'm at a big university. there are people above me who have been at their job for longer than i've been alive (~35 years), cutting (bleeding) edge technology. we still *have* to leave telnet open and available. crazy! the logic goes that there *may* be some professor out on a trip that *only* has access to telnet and therefore we can't turn it off. the answer is that they'll very likely have web access, can download vpn client or at least ssh from *our* servers and be secure in minutes. the outcome, telnet still enabled, hundreds still use it despite all best advice. i can see passwords in the clear.

don't be afraid to contemplate changing how Anonymous works. don't be afraid of pissing a few (or many) people off. else you'll end up still using telnet.

i predict that in a year or so there will be no other option available other than some sort of per-user authentication on any site on the internet. the spammers are hitting blogs, script kiddies are out to exploit any known or unknown vunerability and it will soon be to the point that having any application on the internet that doesn't have some sort of access token (regardless of what information is required to get the token, or what information is kept) will be subject to utter hell.

In reply to Re: Re: No Anonymous Reply Option by zengargoyle
in thread No Anonymous Reply Option by artist

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.