Is PerlMonks better for having Anonymous Monk?

I think that is not one of the right questions.

There are plenty of well-justified explanations around as to why anonymous posting is an important feature of the site. Anonymous posting is never going completely away unless things change rather drastically here. So, your proposed question seems quite useless to me.

Whether Anonymous Monk has been a net positive or net negative influence over the history of the site so far, that doesn't actually determine what should be done. It informs whether "completely get rid of Anonymous Monk" would likely be a net improvement. And even that somewhat side-steps things. What replaces AnonyMonk? What can people read anonymously? Can they post without doing standard registration but without using Anonymous Monk?

Now, I believe that there are lots of potential changes to anonymous access that are worth considering (because there are indeed ways that Anonymous Monk contributes to problems and/or could discourage problems). Indeed, I have pushed for and/or implemented changes to anonymous access over the years.

So questions that I find worth asking are things like: Should we post the source IP of anonymous postings? To what benefit? To what detriment? Should we encourage or require attributed posting by "guests"? To what benefit? To what detriment? Should we publish the hashed first 3 octets of IPs for all postings? Why and why not?

But even better than asking such questions, it would be useful for those with the interest to seriously contemplate a set of improvements and figure out what benefits and problems would result and make and justify a very well thought-out proposal.

Trying to ask questions may help inform some future proposal put together by some careful designer. But the discussion will likely be mostly useless until there is a concrete proposal to focus it.

- tye        

In reply to Re^5: Anonymous Monk? (or not) by tye
in thread Anonymous Monk? by Jim

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