question

How? Why doesn't this forum/site have the option of posting anonymously for those people who feel the need to hide from time to time?

Hi smurf,

You can post anonymously here by using an anonymous login name, but if we allow anonymous proxies, the it's hard to moderate the forum as we would have much more troubleshooting user messing the forum.

In fact if your read our forum rules, we ask all user to be anonymous and to not post any personal details that would make you recognizable.

AZ.

Thank you for replying Allan.

I have read the forum rules several times!

What I'm asking is why we can't maybe post anonymously through a mod. That mod then states it's an anonymous post. We write our post, pm a mod (or anon submit option -similar to mod preview) then they post for us. The only people who technically know who the thread belongs to are the mod team. I appreciate the mod team have plenty of other stuff to be doing and I'm sure most people here wouldn't want to post anonymously, but sometimes someone might want to feel more 'protected' with what they are posting, especially with it being such an open forum.

On the same subject Allan, how can you say we are anonymous, when it is such an open forum, with no private 'members only' spaces for us to post in? These are just questions that I'm throwing open to debate.

If you look back through the extremely old posts from the beginning days of the forum you'll see that people mostly anonymously submitted posts in the form of being a "guest". You can see that this was problematic because people were not accountable for what they said and it lead to more misuse of the forum in terms of abusive posts etc.

In relation to your comment about the possibility of having a members only sections of the forum, I'm obviously not sure what the exact reasons for this are, but I have noticed on other such forums that have this feature that it tends to lead to a lot of posts that go unreplied to and can lead to a false sense of security for members who might be more inclined to reveal more about themselves than is sensible.

smurf wrote:What I'm asking is why we can't maybe post anonymously through a mod. That mod then states it's an anonymous post.

Is that actually stated as against the rules? (I can't be bothered to read through them for the millionth time right at the moment). There was a time when I was a particularly new member here that I asked a mod to do this for me as I was worried about my safety but needed an outlet to talk about specific abuse that would have lead to me being personally identifiable due to it's specific nature. That mod posted for me, stating that it was anonymous, and meant that I could start to get some help and input on something that was particularly scary for me to reveal due to those safety issues. I'm not sure if the rules surrounding that issue were different at that time though.

smurf wrote:private 'members only' spaces for us to post in?

This would probably be the safest place to post in, as we can´t foe list mods.

I'm confused. If it's the specific details of the post that would give you away then what difference does it make who posts it?

Also, what if the user doesn't want themselves associated at all with the information? No one I know IRL knows about this username or most of what I talk about here. But the users on the site are familiar with "Havoctoria". I have a reputation here. Anonymous or not, being judged sucks.

If someone is disgusted with me after I share an honest piece of information about myself, they don't know who they're disgusted with, but I do.

A step even further than that into social Hell would be if the person were given an opportunity to judge me based on that sensitive info over & over again because they keep seeing the name connected to it. At least as Havoctoria, the person would view me in a way I can stand. They wouldn't even associate the unsavory info with that name. Bonus: They may even hold me in higher regard than the "other" anonymous user.

-- Sun Feb 09, 2014 4:46 pm --

I'm not complaining about the current way of things. Just wanted to voice this concern. I don't care all that much if people here think I'm irredeemably, unacceptable weird & gross. But it would be nice to have a back-up account where I reveal more unpleasant/repulsive aspects of myself & embarrassing problems - where everyone could just direct all their pity and negative opinions about me to that "user" - and still be able to walk among those same people under a name that associated with how I'd prefer they see me: as a relatively sane, normal individual whose problems are completely typically & are dealt with competently, successfully & rationally.

I understand though that this doesn't help with recovery. Just saying how I feel.

Why can't we just choose if we want our real username or just 'anonymous' to show before posting?
It wouldn't be like that 'guest' thing because only members could post and mods should still know who's behind 'anonymous'.
I don't see anything wrong with that and it would really be helpful to me and many other people.

littlearcher wrote:i can't speak in terms of the technical parts of the site, but a lot of what mod's end up doing is managing comments/conflicts between different members.

as much as i can see why perhaps some people would want to post anonymously in order to be more "honest," i also think there are other users who would post anonymously in order to say hurtful things.

that is the flipside of the request and i am afraid i think it would happen quite a bit...

Isn't there a way to make only mods know who's posting?

Yeash,but why should others know if mods take care of things?
And they can always foe an anonymous only when he's in anonymous mode(he wouldn't be foed as real username)

Just one more question:
What's your problem with me?