Originally Posted by seebs
Hundreds were posted in the threads.
Obvious examples include:
* Whole categories of people whose jobs REQUIRE that they must not post on the Internet under their real name. Period. All these people are then banned from the forums. Because we know the primary forum trolls were law enforcement and corrections system personnel, right?
* Many women I know who play WoW are pretty careful not to be identified, because they get harassed if people think they're female. Many of them have identifiable names. But that's okay, women were the majority of the trolls, right?
* Forums are full of crazy people who get obsessive and try to stalk other people. Without real names, they can't do much. Give them real names, things change.
* Transgendered people often have a legal name which is not the name they'd usually want to post with. But hey, no problem, we'll just effectively ban them, too.
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None of these are even examples at all, let alone "concrete examples of ... risk ... of physical harm". They're you just saying "Well, these groups
could be targeted."
You also have absolutely no evidence of the 3rd bullet. Ya, stalkers spend all of their times on forums looking for victims, you figured them out. Most users are inexperienced and naive enough that somebody who cared enough could get personal information about them based on disparate facts already available on the forums. I'm not suggesting that realID on forums is good, but this claim is completely asinine and unfounded.