It’s been a rough couple weeks around these parts.
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Questions: When someone asks to be anonymized, do you pull the trigger or suggest a waiting period? Do people do this because they are worried about background checks or online life leaking into RL? Or are they just fed up and want out. ( I realize this requires speculation on your part and I mean in general, not specific to recent anonyms).
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Truly sorry to see that. It was nice and informative to have professional historians like him and @Mindysan33 in the community. I hope he returns here.
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I don’t second-guess people’s decisions, just make certain that they are aware of the consequences. Recent reasons for departure (as conveyed to me) have been the realization the time spent here is negatively affecting their home/online balance, a pulling away from online social discourse entirely, or indeed as you suggest, wanting to separate themselves from their online comments to prevent their comments from tracking them back to their real lives. Very rarely do folks leave because they are “fed up” with being here (again at least how it is expressed to me), but usually because of larger issues at play in which the BBS might be a contributing factor.
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Perhaps Discourse could create an option to “pause” an account. If I want to be locked out of my account for a period of say 30 days that would be a nice option. Facebook has an option like that.
In my case I travel to some places that demand access to all active media accounts at the border. I’d like to be able to disable temporarily.
Maybe this belongs in one of the other Meta threads.
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I suggested that in the past (prompted by a user dealing with a serious illness). @codinghorror really liked the idea at the time, so perhaps it’s already in the queue for Discourse.
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It’s gutting for sure, especially when it’s an active participant. The more so because we don’t know why, or if there’s something that might have changed their mind. I know it’s selfish, but I miss their voices. 
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I like this idea. I have really thought about going anon a lot this week. For me it is because I have put a lot of myself out here and yet I dunno if I feel comfortable continuing. Sometimes I feel like the baggage from here is a liability to other things. Like there are things I do in the world and work on that put my name online in other contexts and this blog attracts some mean vindictive types and like actual nazis and shit. And yeah sometimes I wonder if it’s not destructive for my mental health and thus firmly ending the association is a way to force myself to break free and leave behind the past. Also this past week left me wondering whether my being here at all isn’t just a net negative overall.
Les pane if you’re lurking now though, you’ll be missed. I have no idea how you regarded me but I thought you were a really cool dude.
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This is a really great idea. I sometimes come to the BBS as a distraction to avoid working through personal stuff that really needs to be worked through, and this would make it so much easier to work through those things so that I could then come back in a good place.
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There’s always the log out option.
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The temptation to log back in is too great. Especially when I read a big news story (because it’s not like I can go cold turkey on the news either) and just have to see what the community is saying about it and add my two cents…
But I suppose I’ll have to in the coming months.
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Meither neither!
My name is Millie Fink, and I’m a dope for that bbs dopamine.
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We have this option now,- I’ve asked @orenwolf to lock my account in the past when I needed to concentrate on personal stuff. It’s like a suspension, you can’t log in even if you want to (I see you @Jesse13927 , @milliefink and @anon48584343), except your bio says something like “account suspended at user request.”
I found it very useful. My only complaint was that figuring out how to request reinstatement could be more straightforward.
ETA I share the sentiment about Les_Payne. I didn’t interact directly with them very often, but I enjoyed their posts.
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Follow-up question - if someone requests anonymization, say because they’ve put too much of their personal stuff out there and are worried about getting “outed” IRL, but they want to stay active in the community, can they then simply create a new account and come back maybe more knowledgeable about their comfort levels of sharing personal info online?
And to echo what others have said, Les, if you’re lurking, I’ll really miss hearing about your cool food history classes and adventures.
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I know that in the past @orenwolf has changed a user name at the user’s request to avoid giving away too much. This is simpler for the user, and retains their trust level status.
@orenwolf I don’t know if this idea creates headaches for you. If so, please comment.
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Reading between the lines here, good luck with whatever is happening in the next couple of months…
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Good luck to us all, I’d wager. The election interference trials for many of them are going on in October, and then the primaries will be happening, and COVID is ramping back up in a nasty way again.
All that to say, you can mute whole categories here. Consider that as an option too
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This is a perfectly acceptable option and in fact one I’ve suggested to some. I have no way to know if anyone followed through with that suggestion but I like to believe some have and now enjoy the anonymity and “clean break” they were looking for.
There have been past users who used anonymization to attempt to skirt responsibility for being pas bad actors (because even behind the scenes when we anonymize a user we lose all of their login history, etc.) and reporting on these in this channel has resulted in the community catching those trying to use this process for nefarious intent, but thankfully that is a very small percentage of requests as well.
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