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.

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