Yeah, that's not biased to your point at all. Done reading at that line.

I'm not a troll, but my personal information isn't anyones business. If I want to tell you my info, I will… if not, you're not entitled to it.

This metafilter comment goes through bad points pretty exhaustively:
http://www.metafilter.com/93492/But-my-name-rea…

Nicholas, I agree with your utopianism to an extent, because I like the idea of being more accepting and living without compartmentalisation.

However, stalkers don't need to interact with people on the forums to get information about them. There's no equilibrium in a reveal such as RealID, because there's not necessarily any connection visible between a stalkers harvesting of information and subsequent malicious/creepy/inappropriate actions against their target.

I'm aware that very often fora require 'real' email addresses, not Hotmail and its ilk, but when I bought my domain, I didn't have to prove that I really am the person I say I am – that I'm not actually Boris McHard, a 57 year old fat, bearded truck driver from Cumbria!

My point is that I could have bought borismchard,com, or even elizabethwindsor.co.uk (both of which, incidentally, are available!), registered on a forum with a 'real' email address, used the name which went with it, and nobody would be any the wiser. To all intents and purposes, I'd look like I was using my real name but of course, I'd still be just as anonymous if I'd joined as Zarg the Stinky, using zargthestinky@hotmail.com!

True, where payment is involved, it's going to be different but how many fora require funds?

And I always thought that the way to identify a troll was to look for CAPITALS. Does that mean that I am feeding the troll?

Shining a light on MPs expenses has been key to starting the process of cleaning up politics. Transparency is key to the financial markets. It's key to exposing the BNP for what they are.

The more society is open about all of its participants, the harder it becomes for bigots to survive. I believe that, in the long run, minorities will be better served by transparency than by skulking in the shadows.

I agree that stalking is a problem (as much in real life as on the web). I believe that stalkers start to feel that it is safe (and normal) behind the anonymous veil of the web. If everything was public, the light would be shone on their actions as well, making it much harder to believe that being a stalker was acceptable, and making it much easier for people to discover that people are stalkers too.

In the end, I can't wait until the web is 100% RealID. Only then will it be a civilised place. And by displaying to the rest of society how previously “taboo” activities, sexualities or behaviours are widespread amongst people they know, the more it will defeat prejudice, not increase it.

I may be being utopian, but I feel that there are few things that are better for being hidden in the mouldering dark.

I think my point is that it has hard for the Internet to grow up while anonymity exists. Bringing real identity into the Internet is critical for society accepting it, and our hobbies are normal. I accept that I am probably more comfortable with admitting I play games (given that advising games companies is what I do for a living.) But I also admitted for 10 years when I worked in the City, which is not exactly the most forward thinking part of British society.

In the end, I'd like us all to be able to be ourselves. RealID was, for me, a good step in that direction.

Yes, this world is fantasy. But it's also one that has consequences. People who hide behind anonymity seem to feel that there are no longer consequences, and I think that this is one of the web's biggest downsides, not it's upside.

But most of my commenters appear to disagree with me.

You want trolling to stop on the forums, there's this miraculous new invention called “IP bans”.

+1 to everything Rob said, he's outlined the reasons against very precisely.
More here: http://habitatchronicles.com/2010/07/realid-and…

You claim that this is exactly the kind of thing Blizzard wanted to stop, yet I fail to see the logic of your argument. Sure, it would dampen enthusiasm for people posting abusive messages or bullying each other on the forum, but there are worse things than that out there. These guys published Whipple's personal information on the web, which you describe as bullying – but what of those who would do far, far worse things with such information?

This isn't an idle bit of movie plot fantasy, either – there's a good reason why many people, especially women and minority groups, are extremely careful about revealing their identity online.

I've seen the consequences of this going terribly wrong first-hand. I've been involved for years in running weekend events about Japanese culture in the UK – we bring over Japanese bands, secure rights for early screenings of new films, and so on. On one very memorable occasion, the organisers were approached by a very distressed girl, who had just discovered that a guy she'd talked to on the Internet a few times had turned up at the event just to meet her – having tracked down her details online and flown over the whole way from Texas explicitly for this purpose. Upon discovering that she wasn't prepared to immediately elope with her extremely weird stalker, he started following her around the event, muttering threats and curses under his breath. He became aggressive when the venue's security tried to intervene, and eventually we had to call the police to resolve the situation.

The kind of details which were posted about Micah Whipple are exactly the kind of details about a young woman which a man like that could use to do something very serious.

Personally, I use my real name for almost everything online – but I'm a white, middle-class male living in an extremely liberal city, and have no concerns about my sexuality or identity. Anonymity isn't very important to me. That doesn't mean that it isn't important to other people – or in some cases, even essential to those people's safety and security. Cleaning up an uncivil forum is not worth putting people at risk in that way to accomplish.