Weirddave, kindly cease your use of my RL name here on this board.
I should think no justification is necessary, but FWIW, I would note the following:
I don’t use my RL name on this board.
Posters encounter each other at Dopefests and whatnot, and learn the RL names of other posters. It is not customary to regard that as an invitation to use those names here. And it is especially not an invitation to use those names while Pitting those people.
My RL given name is quite uncommon as a guy’s name. As such, I’m sensitive to its potential to identify me to readers, including non-Dopers, in a way that it wouldn’t if my name was John or Bill. (Hence no link.)
Your use of my given name implies a false intimacy that doesn’t exist. You are not my friend; I am not yours. It’s been years since even a casual observer would have been at all confused on this score.
Doesn’t creating a pit thread just call more attention to the problem? I know what thread you’re referring to and I wouldn’t even have noticed your given name if not for this thread.
I think emailing a mod and asking that your name be deleted, then emailing Weirddave asking that he not use it again would have given you a better end result.
I agree with Honey. I never noticed him using your real name, but now I’m curious. Better to have handled it discreetly, especially since confidentiality is something you desire on the issue.
Can we have a link to the offending post? The one that gives your real name. I think that’s expected practice in a pit thread so we can judge if that thread is pit-worthy.
While I doubt that finding someone by their first name is likely, I do agree that it’s bad form to include names in posts of posters who don’t advertise their first names.
All the search engines I have that can come up with addresses and phone numbers require at least part of a last name so that means going through a telephone book listing by listing, and that wouldn’t tell me whether the person is a man or a woman, giving you a little more anonymity.
AFAIK, Weirddave isn’t violating any formal rules of the board. Custom, yes. Rules, probably not. At the time I was thinking which avenue to pursue, it seemed to me that emailing mods was the appropriate response to a rules violation, but not a breach of custom.
I don’t email Weirddave. A quick mental review of posts he’s addressed to me here ends any question of whether I’d want to give him an excuse to send similar but less constrained missives to my email in-box.
The main sort of identification I’m concerned with is something along the lines of someone noticing that I’m posting while at work. (FWIW, I’m at home today.) This hasn’t happened yet, and I doubt anyone where I work will be ransacking the SDMB archives on the off-chance that RTFirefly might be one of their employees. But just in case there’s ever any real-time monitoring, I’d like to keep any additional linkage between my RL and online personas out of the picture going forward.
Wow. I must have missed some intermediate steps along the way. I knew you guys had a difference of opinion, but when did that translate into open hostility?
Not according to number 3 in the OP. My guess is Marilyn, his dad was a huge Monroe fan and saddled him with that name, as he was born on the day she died.
Look Airman, you need to stop using my name. It’s unique and not very common. But we are not friends, so use Abbie Normal and do not call me by my first name again.
I wouldn’t worry about it. “[RTFirefly’s real first name] is a very popular male first name, ranking 397 out of 1219 for males of all ages in the 1990 US Census.”
Plus it’s short so it’s easy to glance over and miss in a post. If you’re that paranoid about your office superiors getting wind of your online non-work activities there are between a handful and hundreds of people, depending on the size of your company’s IT shop, who are bigger risk factors than Weirddave.
If you’re just using this as a personal grudge kind of thing(“It’s Mr.Firefly to you asshole!”) that’s fine, but objectively the dangers you fear are both minute and entirely under your own control. You could stop doing non-work related stuff at work and end pretty much all the danger.
I didn’t even notice that a “Name” had been posted until this thread drew attention to it. Now I’m working as hard as I can to sign you up for all sorts of Franklin Mint-related crap, credit card offers from Capital One, and I’ve told all the major telecommunications companies that yes, you are veeeeeeeeery interested in being contacted about long-distance savings plans, and that they should call after 11:00pm, since you’re a day-sleeper.
Oh, and you’re a Scientologist now, or soon will be. No need to thank.
I agree with the principle of what RTF is saying: people’s anonymity shjould be preserved, unless they reveal personal details themselves on the board (and not just when they do so at off-board get-togethers). And (on request) the mods should delete such details from postings (or delete the whole posting if it makes no sense without the personal details).
I see no reason the Moderators or other staff of the boards should add to their workload by servicing such requests. They have, collectively, explicitly disclaimed responsibility for what happens off-board in gatherings of posters. From the sticky thread in MPSIMS entitled “Disclaimer (concerning real life meetings of members)”
Enjoy,
Steven(which may or may not be my real name, muwah ha hah!)
