Oh, and Tripler, is it okay if I call you “sugar tits?” 
Bertha DaBlues, actually. But that’ll be our secret.
I think of this “polite fiction” as rather like the internet version of Chatham House Rules.
Fuckin’ A.
If you so desire. (I don’t get the reference, though. . .)
Tripler
::shrugs::
A long time ago, in an internet far, far away…
Way back when the Internet Oracle was pretty well known and fairly heavily used, I began to get harassing phone calls from an irate user because I wouldn’t select his (obviously magnificent) pearls of wisdom for the digests. They stopped shortly after I pointed my phone number to a modem bank. (It’s good to work for a phone company.)
Since then I’ve been a little more discreet about the use of my real name. I’m sure it’d be pretty easy to find, especially since I have my email addy posted, but I tend to be a little more careful now.
Bertha! I can’t believe it’s you! I was at the table next to yours in chemistry lab in high school! I dated your brother, Bjorn Torsink DaBlues.
Hey, how did that little thing with the morals charge come out? 
(It’s me – Hortense Rotman. The one with the pink leotard that caught on fire during the SATs)
Me too!!
“Lighten up, Francis.”
You know it’s a little annoying to me even when a poster has no problem with it. Say some poster has revealed their IRL 1st name- and then a few who have met/know that poster respond to that poster using that name. It’s confusing. They’ll say something like “Good post Bob”, and there is no Bob as a poster name.
Even if “Bob” signs his posts with “Bob” if his postername is “MrSillyPants” that’s what I like to see him refered to. But that’s just me.
I remember you! Or was it your cousin . . . Bessie Mae Mucho? I always got you two confused. You were the one witih the harelip, right?
Indeed. I seem to recall a case last year where a member of this message board—an administrator, no less—knowingly flouted the SDMB/Chicago Reader privacy policy by making a criminal allegation about one of our members and then providing a link to his real name, contact information, and photograph. The administrator in question was suspended, and Ed Zotti was obliged to issue an apology to the member concerned and a public comment confirming the SDMB’s commitment to its members’ privacy.
I’m glad that you absolutely understand how upsetting such a violation of privacy would be to the person involved, and that you extend the same respect and consideration to others as you expect for yourself.
When Mel Gibson was pulled over for drunk driving, he referred to a female police officer as “sugar tits.”
Now what the hell is so anti-Semitic about that? Geez. You’d think he called Dubya a “Communist” or something. . .
Tripler
I kid! I kid!
I remember the Stage Manager debacle. That poster used his real name in his public email address, and that is how I found out that, according to a sexual offender database, his attempt to catagorize his crime as more of a misunderstanding than anything else was sick and wrong. Dude was convicted of a heinous, brutal sexual crime against a minor, and that might even have been a plead-down.
If you don’t want your real name known, don’t use it as your frigging email address. Duh.