Yes, I thought you were a bit harsh on this occasion Alan! I split this thread out from the chippy one so that I could answer the questions, which are no longer about who makes the best chips.
Why for that matter is the forum anonymised?
It's a legacy issue as much as anything. This forum is more than 10 years old and when it was first set up visitors could post as guests. They didn't even need to log in and everything worked pretty well. But gradually the dreaded spammers started to hijack it trying to post their links for viagra, prescription drugs and pornography. It wasn't just happening on this site but across the entire www on all kinds of platforms. They rendered the first guest book on the site unworkable and then the second, more sophisticated one, as the spammers go cleverer too. It was a running battle to keep removing them from the forum and the need to introduce some form of control became essential. This was to force users to register. Many of our first users registered with their own names, often just their first names like Dave, Howard, Barbara, Alison etc. (all who are still with us) but gradually more and more people started using "handles" or aliases. All I was interested in was stopping the spammers and I didn't see much of an issue with this at the time.
However, experience has shown that people posting under their real name are generally more thoughtful and considerate about what they write. Given that time over again I would probably insist that people use their real names to register. In fact I have been considering introducing this as a requirement for new users for a while but haven't quite reached that point yet.
