Tom Michael wrote: 2) In Yahoo!, anonymity rules. In a newsgroup, it's harder to be anonymous. I have campaigned against anonymous posting in all quiz bowl discussion fora since 1993...Mailing lists and newsgroups have safety mechanisms against these problems that Yahoo! does not. On this topic (and as I mentioned before in passing): Be EXTREMELY careful about keeping multiple Yahoo! accounts. Yahoo! conflated two accounts that I thought I'd been meticulous about keeping separate -- probably because both had to be tied to another e-mail account and I used the same one -- to the point where it stuck my alias for one account in the headers of all my outgoing mail from the other. And, there was NO way to edit this out of my profile. Believe me, I tried. I wound up cancelling the accounts and starting over under a new name. If you're maintaining more than one Yahoo! username, DO NOT REFER THEM TO THE SAME OUTSIDE E-MAIL ADDRESS UNLESS YOU WANT THEM TO BE MIXED UP. I was so angry that I would have completely written off ANY further use of Yahoo! for ANYTHING if it weren't for this club. As far as "anonymous postings" go -- most of the regulars here, if they use nicknames, seem to be pretty open about exactly who they are. I haven't yet updated my current user profile to tie it to my real name, but that's just been an artifact of being disorganized (a lot of this will be happening until I have my dissertation completed!) A lot of people like to use nicknames for one or both of two reasons: First, it personalizes one's correspondence in a way that no name your parents stuck you with ever could. :-) Second, it may be seen as a way to at least divert some of the massive chunks of spam that hit everyone's fans so regularly. Julie Who, if she had a choice, probably would have picked "Cicindela" to be her first name, since it's the genus name of a gorgeous blue-green beetle with way cool sickle-shaped mandibles. :-)
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