Sorry I vanished, I had to run off to a meeting and I'm now on my way out the door again and not sure when I'll be able to get back to this.

My quick skim looks like I don't have anything to add right now.

We maintain a culture where we like to know with whom we are speaking, and SPs are a deliberate subversion of this culture by posters who know that.

This is an honest question. Why is this bad? So Poster X decides he wants to be Wanda the Weird for a few posts. Treat Wanda like Wanda and X like X. If Wanda and X start long discussions together or backing up each other's statements without acknowledging the connection (see ID in profile), it's becomes worrisome and worth wondering about multiple personality issues, but that's the only problem I see.

So someone wants to let another part of their personality out to play without all the baggage that is attached to the more familiar identity? So what?

Except for the people who have met face to face, no one knows who they're talking to on the internet. You've just got my word for it that I'm a 44-year-old woman in Utah (OK, there are some witnesses otherwise). I am legitimately puzzled by the "I have to know who I'm talking to" issue. I interact with the identity as it's presented. I don't care if they're all expressions of the marvelous complexity that is one individual.

I think the FAQ is too huge to hide policies in. As I said in Bureau, I think we need to include the rules (when they are compiled) with etiquette. Or at least link to them from there.

You've just got my word for it that I'm a 44-year-old woman in Utah

I don't care if you're a 44 year old woman in Utah. However, I have become very accustomed to attaching your user name to the words that follow it and the brain behind them both. It's my preferred method of interaction.

I don't have to understand your appreciation of multi-facetedness being expressed with multiple IDs to get that you have it.

Me? Doesn't work that way for my reading experience.

If you want to change your ID to Wanda The Weird -- that I could also care less about. It's still your ID to your brain.

On the one hand, "please ID yourself when you sockpuppet" is a social conformity thing, like "please don't sign your post that is dorky." Somebody fails to conform, somebody else gets grumpy, the pod takes over and conformity occurs, or an argument ensues over whether conformity is required, or conformity does not ensue and sore points may spring up.

To my knowledge, non-signage of one's name to a post is not in the FAQ or Etiquette or any other rule document. On the other hand, it's a visible conformity-failure when somebody signs their posts. When somebody sockpuppets without the ID, it's not necessarily obvious that he/she is violating our happy tin-hatted conformity, confusion ensues, and you get arguments like what has been happening of late.

So, like, just for the sake of clarity, it's worthwhile to add something to Etiquette/Rules (right next to the citation of "please don't sign up as Josh Whedon that's stupid" and "please don't sign up as Fuckface that's juvenile").

For the record, we consensed about all of the above without voting on them. For the record, I am a consensetarian whenever it saves labor.

Then to re-answer my answer, I don't know where policies are as they seem to be spread out.

Right now, this seems to be the bigger issue. msbelle IDed the problem yesterday, but Aimee's response gets it in a nutshell. We have no official policy page, hence the Etiquette page functions as the closest thing we have. So there's a problem with terminology when some posters are saying "I want to treat this as an etiquette issue, not a policy issue."

Hmm. How to clarify. Perhaps the issue is, do we want a vote on whether or not to include this as a new policy in the Etiquette page, or do we just want to make it an unwritten part of the code of behavior?

I don't think the problem with sockpuppets is people feeling left out. The thing I find (mildly) distressing about sockpuppets (at least with no ID in the profile, which is always the first thing I check) is the back and forth of thinking I know who it is and then thinking that I was wrong and I don't know who it is.

The closest comparison I can make from life outside the internet was a phone call I got when I was a teenager. I didn't recognize the voice, so I asked who I was talking to. They said "Guess!" and I guessed that it was my uncle Tim, since he was the only person I could think might do that. They said "Right!" A little further into the conversation I realized that it was a complete stranger making a prank phone call and hung up.

I actually enjoy the sock-puppet humour as long as there is a way of telling who it actually is, so asking for an ID in the profile would completely take care of my problems with sockpuppets.

As a final note: damn, it's hard to not type "cockpuppets".

We maintain a culture where we like to know with whom we are speaking, and SPs are a deliberate subversion of this culture by posters who know that.

Bwah! Yes, in the nefarious pursuit of what? Something weighty, purposeful and undermining, right? A few laughs, entertaining some of the other posters for a little while? Shit, it can't be that simple. It has to be conspiratorial. C'mon, you differently-identitied (you thought I'd forgotten, right?) -- TELL US WHO YOU ARE PUPPETTING FOR?

For the record, we consensed about all of the above without voting on them. For the record, I am a consensetarian whenever it saves labor.

Those discussions took place prior to voting on the board. specifically in 12/02 and voting was not started until 2/03.

As I said earlier, not one written thing about "we don't do this" or "if you do this, this will happen" has been added to the FAQ or the Etiquette page without a vote since voting was approved - not as far as I can find.

What surprises me most about this discussion is how reluctant people are to letting go of the fact that not everyone shares their visceral reactions. I'm pretty sure I'm offended by stuff msbelle's not, and vice versa.

I don't care. I'm not second-guessing her sensitivity -- I'm going to take on faith that she's sincere, and neither mock nor try to argue her out of it.

Now, do I care enough about how *I* feel about the topic that offends her versus my concern with her feelings? A completely different question. Is not offending her too difficult for me to do? Important enough for me to do? That's between my and my god. One man's meat is another man's poison.

It's not a new idea.