Anonymous Posting in Online Communities
Online communities vary with their stances on anonymous postings. Wikipedia allows anonymous editing in most cases, but does not label users, instead identifying them by their IP addresses, with other editors commonly referring to them with neutral terms such as "anons" or "IPs".
Many online bulletin boards require users to be signed to write (and in some cases, even to read) posts. 2channel and other Futaba-based image boards take an opposite stance, encouraging the anonymity, and in the case of English Futaba-based websites, calling those who use usernames and tripcodes "namefags" and "tripfags," respectively. As required by law, even communities such as 4chan do require the logging of IP addresses of such anonymous posters. Such data however, can only be accessed by the particular site administrator.
Slashdot discourages anonymous posting by referring to anonymous posters as "anonymous coward". The mildly derogatory term is meant to chide anonymous contributors into logging in.
Read more about this topic: Anonymous Post
Famous quotes containing the words anonymous, posting and/or communities:
“Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse- nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice—with an angel bobbing about unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive.
Oh, England. Sick in head and sick in heart,
Sick in whole and every part,
And yet sicker thou art still
For thinking that thou art not ill.”
—Thomas Henry Anonymous (1825–95)
“My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“... feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, or we are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)