If you need a confidant by proxy I’m sure there are plenty of… um… respectful posters who would be willing to help out without shame.
I, for one, have no shame what so ever.
But I think posting something for someone else is against the rules somehow. I just can’t remember which rule it is.
I’m not sure we’ve dealt with this question directly, but to me, it sounds like the same “one person per account” rule that we use when asking people not to post questions directly from friends and family members and such.
Why is it so hard to grasp the purpose of the request in the OP? This is not for things that one would desperately want to keep private. This is not for things that “will come back to haunt you”. This is for stuff that you’d rather keep from friends and coworkers that you know are reading the SDMB and know your username.
e.g. if you’re planning on voting for McCain but you’d rather your coworkers don’t know about it, you still might want to ask a relevant question to get the feedback from Dopers.
If your coworkers somehow do some detective work and after a lot of effort figure out that this alternate identity is in fact you, it’s not the end of the world. But that doesn’t mean that you want to make it too obvious or too easy for your real-life friends and coworkers to figure out some things about you.
By the way, there are a lot of friends and coworkers of mine that I know would love this place and the topics discussed here, but I never direct them here, because there are enough little details I have mentioned over time that would enable my friends to figure out who I am. It’s not a big deal if they do figure out, since I have not posted anything that will “come back to haunt me”, but I don’t necessarily want to make it easy for them.
So, in a sense, at least in my case, the SDMB is losing on potentially several more posters (and therefore revenue) by not allowing this two-step identity protection. I would suspect others here also refrain from directing their friends here for similar reasons, but, of course I have no cite.
I am having zero difficulty with your OP. I was answering the question specifically posed by Sapo, who proposed a slightly different purpose for these socks.
To tell you the truth I don’t see a big difference here. To me, the no-sock rule should be absolute- it doesn’t matter who you are trying to keep the information from, whether it’s other posters or people you know in real life.
So, it’s a way to be deceptive, even if the deceit is only through a lie of omission?
Personally I can’t see why personal accountability should ever come up as a value among a community vetted to fighting ignorance.
Can’t see it at all.
Aren’t you being “deceptive” by using the username “nd_n8”? Why don’t you tell us what your real name is, so there is no deception?
By the way, this whole “don’t post anything you wouldn’t want written on a 25-foot billboard next to your house” is a bit silly. Since people can ultimately find a way to figure out who you are, even if you post as “fluffy_bunny”, what is the purpose of having usernames and not using real names?
The reason is that, even though people could ultimately figure out who fluffy_bunny is, that person doesn’t want to make it glaringly obvious and easy for everyone looking at their posts to know that they are coming from “Joe McIntosh”.
Same with the request in the OP. It’s not that complicated, or that different from the policy of allowing one username per account.
(Again, with the caveat that the board software can automatically impose the can’t-post-in-the-same-thread rule for the two identities)
But I do, my name is Nate and I’m from Indy. Formerly of Indianapolis, currently of Whiteland (which is what my location will most likely say after tomorrow). The encryption is simply a unique username as many other variations of my name have already been taken.
ETA: And FTR, there is nothing I have ever posted here or elsewhere that I would ever want to hide from anyone. If someone insists on placing a picture of my giant turds on a 25 foot billboard outside of my house with my name on it, hell, I’ll probably post pictures of myself standing next to it.
It’s not even that, so much. You might, for example, want to ask a question about marriage difficulty without being known as “the guy with the bad marriage” or whatever. Board rep can be important, too.
How about one designated sock puppet, with an open username and password, that anyone could use? Anyone could log in as it to post embarrassing questions, but everyone would know not to take it seriously in any other sort of discussion, since it would be an acknowledged sock.
We could name it “Scapegoat.”
Hilarious. How could that possibly go wrong?
But who would want to use it after some of the guys here have used it?! It would be so dirty. Ewww.