[seebs]

Originally Posted by Cralor I'd be interested in these.

Hundreds were posted in the threads.

Obvious examples include:
* Whole categories of people whose jobs REQUIRE that they must not post on the Internet under their real name. Period. All these people are then banned from the forums. Because we know the primary forum trolls were law enforcement and corrections system personnel, right?
* Many women I know who play WoW are pretty careful not to be identified, because they get harassed if people think they're female. Many of them have identifiable names. But that's okay, women were the majority of the trolls, right?
* Forums are full of crazy people who get obsessive and try to stalk other people. Without real names, they can't do much. Give them real names, things change.
* Transgendered people often have a legal name which is not the name they'd usually want to post with. But hey, no problem, we'll just effectively ban them, too.

The problem is that, fundamentally, it is extremely stupid to mandate that people have their posts on an internet game forum be easily associated with their real identity, especially for the fairly large number of people who can be tracked down quite easily given their name. (And that's not just "people who have facebook accounts"; you can get my home address from public records whether or not I willingly post it.)

How do you know?

Well, on the one hand, they say they backed down due to the feedback. On the other hand, they do not, in this post or any other, acknowledge that there were actual problems with the proposal -- so the only thing left they could be responding to is the sheer volume of angry people.

And what is this Facebook thing? How do you know that comes into play at all?

The facebook thing is the publically announced deal where they are doing facebook integration with Real ID. And they put out a press release, so it's not as though this is secret. If you look at Real ID stuff before that was announced, it was full of stuff about preserving privacy and offering privacy controls. When the facebook thing was announced, they said they didn't anticipate any user pushback about not having any privacy controls, because people don't care much about privacy.

It's not proof, but it's a pretty good working hypothesis that the facebook deal is closely tied to the sudden change in their policy.

Ultimately, I believe the Real Names is a harmful step, but feel that it was not done with bad intentions.

How is this possible? I've explained the proposed idea to dozens of people. Every one of those people who had ever dealt with any kind of security or privacy issue in any capacity, every one of them who had ever been female and used the Internet, every one of them who had ever dealt with or even read about stalkers, immediately said "holy *!@#*! that's a stupid idea". It isn't just a tiny bit bad, it is stunningly and obviously bad. It genuinely frightens me to imagine that there are adults living on their own who can't immediately see the badness.

I feel like I'm surrounded by people who are saying "yes, I like this idea of keeping all the fresh vegetables at the grocery store under heat lamps to keep them crisp and fresh", and who, once the problems are pointed out, then say "well, I guess it wouldn't work, but I don't see what makes you think it was undertaken with bad intentions."

Blizzard is a company that I continue to respect. There is only so many Blue Posts that establish the players' understandings. This is how many things get misconstrued.

I cannot conceive of any way in which I could trust someone dumb enough to sincerely propose this idea, let alone a group of people who, after spending "a very long time" thinking about it, had not realized that it was catastrophically bad. But now we have them revealing that, despite the nearly 50,000 post thread, and the dozens of examples from people like law enforcement officers, people in the witness protection program, people whose exes have shot at them, and so on, they still don't see anything wrong with it except that people were complaining.

Okay, imagine that you stand on someone's foot, and they yell about it, and you move back. And then you say "well, obviously you didn't like me standing there, so I won't stand there for the time being, but I might stand there again later, because by then you might not mind". Does that suggest that you have any comprehension of what happened? No, it suggests that you didn't understand it at all. And that would make you Blizzard in this scenario.