Who are you? Who, who, who, who? Montana Standard will now tell who posted old comments

Don't take it as I'm saying it's OK to be an asshole. It's just that I've vented about work and the business in general and while I don't believe I've crossed any lines, it's still things I'd rather my boss not hear me say. Maybe I'm sensitive because I got outed on another message board in which over the course of 10 years I had vented about things ranging from marriage to work, only to have the person who outed me print some of the rants and mail one to my wife. Lucky for me she's the personality to understand people have to vent from time to time.

 

This thread can no longer be seen from the Journalism Topics board. Glitch?

 

I can see it.

 

I think it's totally lame to suddenly change a privacy policy for this midstream. Even if there's no legal issue, I find it a serious moral issue to promise people a particular level of privacy in their terms and conditions and then retroactively change your mind.

That being said, I almost always use forum names that can easily be connected with my name and given my fairly unusual last name, it usually takes about 15 seconds of work to out me. Noms de guerre have a tendency to backfire and not using an alias serves to keep me honest and not saying things from which I wouldn't want to disassociate.

 

completely invisible to me. Maybe I was blocked by the thread starter

 

In a similar vein, I don't know if this paper uses anonymous sources in their stories. But if you were a source and wanted to maintain anonymity, how could you trust that the paper would keep your name private?

 

That and if they do use anonymous sources that would be a bit hypocritical considering this policy.

 

I think we'd all be wise to remember that anonymity, much like privacy, doesn't really exist on the Internet.

 

Criminal?

Kind of over the top, huh?

Sorry I'm in PC's camp.
I get the "don't be an asshole" thing may not make the cut, but you are posting - anonymous or otherwise - on a site owned by someone else. I suppose you can have an expectation of privacy, but it sure as hell ain't guaranteed!

To me this is kind of shifting blame: Yeah, I posted all those means things in the comments section of the story, but it's your fault that people know it was Me!

Disclosure: When I worked at the paper I wanted to do a story outing some of our commenters. We had two public officials commenting on stories, bashing fellow elected officials, while heaping praise on themselves. We also had several wanna-be politicians and movers and shakers making comments.
My editor nixed the idea. I don't think he even ran the idea through corporate or its lawyers. He didn't like the idea of outing the commenters; it was picking and choosing, instead of all or none.

 

I think it was Jesus who said to love even obnoxious asshole Internet commenters.

So even though I have wanted to punch some of them through the computer screen, it's wrong to do what this paper is planning.

 

Speaking of assholes, that guy/gal takes the cake.

 

My comment only applies to changing the anonymity policy after the fact. I have no issues if a paper says "For now on, no more anonymous comments" and, in fact, support the idea. It would certainly be a step in the right direction.