> but is there not some humor and irony in the fact ... Indeed. > Are there any anonymous moderators? Only in the sense that whether a person is a moderator is not generally public knowledge. The "anonymous" account is a singleton and has no moderation privileges unless the forum operator assigns it to them (in which case all anonymous users could moderate (and chaos ensues)). > Are not accounts with names still anonymous, unless one provides their real full name? Essentially, yes, but readers know that User X is always User X, whereas "anonymous" can be any number of people at a time, and many people tend to prefer to know they're interacting with the same person each time they see a given name. We often see threads of anonymous users "talking to themselves," answering their own questions, or so it would appear if the name were anything other than "anonymous".