Not sure if vBulletin has the tools to allow this, but it would be good to have an alternate posting name, in addition to your regular one, so that you can ask questions of a more personal nature.
e.g. I may want to ask a question about hemorrhoids or marriage problems, and while it’s not the worst thing in the world if my real-life friends and colleagues found out about these problems, I’d rather they not.
Sometimes I want to show my friends some interesting thread that I am participating in, but, if I do, they can quickly figure out which username is me, in which case they can figure out all the other things I have posted, which could include personal stuff I’d rather they not know (yes I know I should treat everything on the internet as not private and possibly-discoverable, but I’m not talking about super-sensitive stuff that I would never want anyone to find out, and also, there is no reason to make it super-easy or super-obvious for people to find out this info about you even if it is not super-sensitive stuff)
As the rules currently stand, I can either ask questions about personal stuff and not tell my friends about any of my SDMB discussions, or I can tell my friends about some of my SDMB discussions and not ask any questions about personal stuff.
Having another posting identity, tied to your account, which the mods would know about, would eliminate all this.
Also, if the issue is that we don’t want people posting in the same thread under two different posting identities, so that they won’t be cheerleaders for their own arguments, maybe there is a way so that if you post in a thread using one of your two identities, your other identity is not allowed to post in that thread. Is this possible with current board software?
Anyway, the most likely answer to this request is ‘No!’, but I thought I’d throw the idea out there to see what people think.