Anonymity

[AndreasWinsnes]

we'd have to verify your supervisor's identity, and so on, and so on...

You can check http://uit.no/ Choose English, search for his name and you even get a picture. But may the university is fake too? Or just the website?

[Barnaby_McEwan]

As a matter of fact it is possible to provide a link which looks genuine but leads to a fake site: that's how phishing scams fool people into providing their bank or credit card details to criminals.

But anyway I used your example to illustrate a general problem with verifying someone's identity. In your case I guess it would be relatively easy to determine that someone called Andreas Winsnes is known to that university department, but how do we confirm that the person posting here under that name is the same person? A picture is no use. We'd have to have some other way of contacting the Andreas Wisnes known to the university department. They aren't going to give us that person's phone number, and we can't yet trust anything told to us by the Andreas Wisnes posting here, because his identity is not verified. Now muliply that problem by about 200 (the number of members here) and you get some idea of the size of the burden you'd have us take on.

I am tired of explaining this problem to you. People will continue to be able to post anonymously.

[AndreasWinsnes]

Don't you think the real Andreas Winsnes would stand up if he found out that someone was using his name? Let me answer that question: I certainly would. Most people are not able to pull of phising scams, as far as I know, and one can therefore weed out most cases of fraud by checking people's identity. I get your point, but if one person's reputation gets badly hurt, then that is one too many, and an apology might not be enough.

I am not out to get NAFPS. On the contrary, I hope your arguments in favour of anonymity can withstand criticism if an innocent person some day gets wrongly accused.

[Barnaby_McEwan]

I get your point...

Good, because this discussion is now over.