> it's impossible to distinguish different anonymous posters > from one or several posters, who knows... As long as the conversation is progressing, does it really matter who I am and whether I am the same person as the one interested in documentation on temporary files or `sqlite3_auto_extension`? (I am not, by the way.) > Arbitrary handle names are anonymous in nature Sorry, I cannot agree with that. Anonymity is different from pseudonymity because the latter implies a persistent identity while the former does not. > it's not like anonymous posting protects privacy in any way It doesn't quite matter what the real name of J. Random Hacker from the Internet is if you know their typical IP address subnets (⇒ GeoIP-based location), posting hours (+ timezone ⇒ awake hours, typical times when J. is home/at work), and their writing quirks. (See: "authorship attribution in NLP". It's a well known enough problem that a variation on it is a typical homework in a machine learning course nowadays. Add [third-party cookies] (https://robertheaton.com/2017/11/20/how-does-online-tracking-actually-work/) to that and you've got their browsing history. If all that added together doesn't identify a user down to a single person, I guess they don't use the Web much in the first place and therefore aren't worth tracking. Thankfully, tracking the users doesn't seem to be the goal of this forum.) > and nothing prevents anyone from abandonning a given handle for another one But that's extra work for the website to store all those one-off entries in the user table. If you want to make one-time use handles anonymous, you should make them more transparent. Besides, would you *really* like it if I used one-off logins instead if just being anonymous? It wouldn't help you identify me in a thread; you would still have to infer my identity from the points I make, just like you do now. > for whatever weird or twisted reason! There must be a philosophical difference between your values and mine. For some people anonymity is an end in itself (so, no reason), just like it is important for you to be able to identify people you converse with (for whatever twisted or weird reason, I could add). If you want a reason, consider this: maintaining an identity is extra work for me (make up a login, generate a password, store it in the password manager, accept the risk of user database getting leaked with whatever other information it had stored) and for the website (for every login I create it has to store an entry in the user table that might never get used again if I abandon that handle). And I'm not one of the core developers, so my name (real or otherwise) won't add any credibility to my words. In my opinion, as long as everyone is being civil, this extra work could be avoided.