I know why sock puppets are banned and I agree with the reasons for it.
However, what about non-malicious sock puppets? In some cases, a person might just want to ask one or two questions anonymously for perfectly valid, defensible reasons. Maybe they don’t want people who know them and read the board (whether board members or real life friends and family) to know about something, from the serious to the trivial.
What if I want to ask questions about my cancer without people I know finding out about it?
What if I wanted to talk about my tiny penis without my coworkers finding out?
And I’m sure there are a thousand different reasons.
The list is endless. My question is:
So, what if someone is already paying for membership and uses a temporary sock puppet for privacy purposes, and maybe even notifies the mods, is it still a problem?
Obviously, nothing can stop someone from doing it, with or without approval, but is the policy on people who want to come clean later, if whatever reason they had for anonymity is gone?
We don’t like it, we have never cared for it, chances are we will never allow it.
Don’t do it.
If you have a subject that you don’t want posted under your name, perhaps that is a sign that your proposed topic is not appropriate for this message board and that you shouldn’t be posting about it.
If you don’t want your family reading about your innermost feelings or your boss hearing about your exploits or anyone that might know you seeing your true confessions, don’t post them for the rest of the world to see. This has proven to be a problem for some of our people further down the line – they made posts before they acquired a spouse or had a job change or assumed public office, to name just a few of the situations we’ve seen over time – we’ve also had Dopers that wound up in divorce court or family jurisdictions and all of a sudden what was cute and kinda funny to tell on yourself is now perceived as evidence/ammo to be used against you in a court of law. Or your boss now reads the board and put two and two together and knows more about you than you like, enough that maybe you won’t advance on the job or get a raise . . . or maybe you’ll lose your job.
For the most part what you put here stays here for a long time. That’s in the rules too, see here:
We welcome your input, it’s your community, the board is what you make it. But don’t do yourself a damage while you’re at it. We rarely delete a posting because you have remorse over what you wrote, the usual response is “that’s too bad.” And it is.
And if we find a poster using two screen names, well, that’s also in the rules: