p51 wrote:
Nobody has yet to address the point I brought up earlier; how would you know the name the person uses is really theirs?
I could just say my name is something, but that doesn't make it so.
I've seen people make up profiles on forums in the name of other people to make enemies online (and later, in real life) without the real person having a clue until the damage is done.
Think of the cases where someone is vilified in the media but doesn't have a Facebook presence for people to vent their spleens toward. How often have you heard of people making a profile in that person's name as a conduit for that hate?
That's a huge unresolved issue. The only way to solve that would be identification verification. New people joining would have to send some kind of I.D. to the Mods, like a driver's license, passport, W-2, etc. Doing that would open up a whole can of worms regarding privacy issues which could subject Scott to legal liability. Besides that, I doubt that Scott and/or the Mods would want the headache of administrating such a verification service, along with protecting and disposing of submitted private information. We already have enough invasion of privacy issues from Google, search engines, and numerous Federal agencies, so we don't need a new one here, imo.