I can feel your presence, lurkers! You are thinking of joining but first need a screen name. I invite other Dopers to join me in offering cautionary and suggestionary advice (but remember that any names you suggest are free to be used by any lurker. The early bird gets the worm!).
Point the first: Make sure your screen name doesn’t suck. The following names could ruin your posting experience at SDMB for a variety of self-evident reasons:
**Cautionary Names
Che Forchever
Drunk Freemason
Bush/Cheney '08
Vulva Con Carne**
Wow–don’t go there! On the other hand, the following excellent screen names are very likely to facilitate a rewarding and pleasurable posting lifestyle:
**Suggestionary Names
Romulus Augustulus
Swiss Hard
Ben Jonson
Ursine Sister
10 Loft
Nutriceutical**
You get the idea! Pick one of these names, stop lurking, and get with the pic!
Dopers, it’s your turn: Cautionary and suggestionary names, please.
Hmmm, can’t really think of any **suggestionary **ones at the moment. Except of course Aeschines, but I understand some doorknob already took that one.
I Hate Douglas Adams
Future Trophy Wife of Bush
ArseFucker and/or Horsecunt
Liberals Hate America
Once. In the 1960’s. For 20 Minutes.
1920’s St-…mm…nevermind.
Cookies are for Queers.
Suggested
Generic Discordia/Illuminatus/Hitchhiker/Hobbit/Dune/Other “Cult Classic” Sci-Fi Name
I FUCKING LOVE CATS and/or DOGS
Desperate, Single, Looking
Nitpick: it’s nutraceutical. Just sayin’.
Avoid any really long names, anything sexually explicit, violent, or just viscerally disgusting, and anything alphanumeric (unless it’s well-known, like “THX1138”). And please avoid the awkwardly juvenile or babytalk-ish. If it’s something your four-year-old could come up with, it’s probably in that category.
And be mindful of the sorts of categorical assumptions your name may encourage re. gender (especially), but also race, class, educational level, age and emotional maturity (or the lack of it), etc. In my case, people often assume I’m male, even though I dropped the “Bartleby” bit and often refer to myself as being female. I think the regular posters basically know that now, but newbies will often get it wrong, and I usually don’t bother to issue a correction.
By way of example, there used to be a poster named “Vinnie Virginslayer”. Even though I genuinely liked the guy’s posts for the most part and shared his interest in football in particular (though not the Steelers), I also had to struggle to ignore the disturbing implications of his nom-de-keyboard, as you can imagine.