# Pit thread for Martin\_Hyde {He has been BANNED}

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pit-thread-for-martin-hyde-he-has-been-banned/965045>\
**Category:** The BBQ Pit\
**Created:** [May 24, 2022, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pit-thread-for-martin-hyde-he-has-been-banned/965045 "2022-05-24T22:52:34Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 1188

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**Author:** ![Martin\_Hyde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/47e85d/32.png) [@Martin\_Hyde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Martin_Hyde)\
**Post date:** [July 19, 2022, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pit-thread-for-martin-hyde-he-has-been-banned/965045/1188 "2022-07-19T00:56:23Z")

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> [@Mr.E](#):
>
> I just feel the need to point out that this is still a completely wild thing to admit. When people want to keep their private information private, they simply omit details or are intentionally vague in an open and honest way. I promise you that if you said you went to a military academy after high school and served in the armed forces and retired as a senior (but not flag level) officer that would be perfectly fine. Nobody is asking for specific dates and ranks and locations, and if they did it would be perfectly reasonable to say no, you’re not interested or comfortable giving out that sort of information. It’s very strange and perhaps telling that you feel this is harder to do than giving out specific but incorrect details.

I don’t disagree–but I also think that requires a different sort of discipline, one that I guess I don’t have. What I found after some early misadventures on older message boards is it was very easy to, over minor snippets of detail here and there, to leak out a lot more about myself than I wanted. By the time I discovered this forum I had learned better, and it became my practice to have a very specific “technique”, maybe it is overly complex to you, but for me it has allowed me to post on multiple forums of this kind for many years without inadvertently sharing anything that could be used to identify myself–something that I was not able to do prior to developing the technique.

> [@Mr.E](#):
>
> This supposed “technique” makes no sense because no potential foe is going to collect these snippets to figure out who you are in real life only to shout “Alas! Outfoxed by a clever poster, carefully altering his anecdotes to make himself an unknowable cipher!” They’re going to say “Oh, this guy is full of shit, wait until I tell everyone” which is exactly what happened here. And your response amounts to “Of course I’m full of shit, you’re all idiots to believe anything I’ve said, except for the honest parts, and I definitely won’t be pointing out which parts are honest and which parts are not.”

And yet I’ve seen this very thing done. I’ve actually done it myself as well, I’ve been involved in some very adversarial things on other forums where I have obtained personal information on other people to use defensively if I felt the need, or to provide to people who were being targeted for attack themselves to use as a way to counter.

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