[TYPO3] OT: "Real" names

[Christopher Torgalson]

Hi,

On 9/22/07, Dmitry Dulepov [typo3] <dmitry at typo3.org> wrote:


> Sorry, can't help you anymore. If you do not respect mailing list rules (no full name in message), you do not respect me in particular. No help than.


Dmitry please stop this.

If you want to talk about respect, you have earned a great deal of
respect for all the work you do on the core, in your extensions, and
on these lists. The community definitely benefits in a big way from
your presence, knowledge and energy. But this fanatical insistence of
yours that mailing list participants provide their full names as a
condition of their participation here is nonsensical, irrelevant, and
counterproductive.

There is NO lack of respect exhibited towards you or anyone else by a
person who chooses not to reveal his or her name to a group of people
who are, at the outset at least, strangers, or who chooses not to have
his or her name permanently recorded in an archive over which s/he has
no control. There are sometimes very, very good reasons for doing
this, and NONE of these reasons has anything whatsoever to do with
YOU. It is, in fact, none of your business how anybody chooses to
identify themselves in non-private communications with you. What's
more, the list rules do NOT ask for full names in messages, they ask
for REAL names. "Christopher" Is definitely my real name, even if I
don't provide you with my surname and/or middle name(s) (if any).

In my opinion, it is far more disrespectful of you to demand more
personal information from mailing list participants than they are
comfortable revealing than it is for a participant to provide a
limited amount of personal information. Would you say, for example,
that it should be a condition of participation in this list for every
participant to reveal not only their full names, but also their places
of employment, their home addresses and the names and vital statistics
of their immediate family members? Because, for persons with names
less common than 'Smith', this is exactly what you may be insisting
upon by demanding to know their real names.

If you won't help people who won't give their names then so be it--but
let's be very clear: your refusal to do so *for this reason* looks
juvenile and petty. All the more so since you have absolutely no means
of verifying that the 'real' name given is actually real.

Real names are requested in the list rules*, but posts like this one
of yours fly completely in the face of the statement that "we're a
friendly list". Feel free to completely ignore threads where no real
name is given, but please stop insisting that this poorly considered
"rule"--which, after all, is worded as a polite request--be treated as
an absolute requirement.


-- 
Christopher Torgalson
http://www.typo3apprentice.com/


* "Names - please use your real name - we're a friendly list that
likes to know whom we're talking!"