Effective immediately, you now are required to log into the site in order to participate in the Sound Off chat. We’ll see how it goes this week before deciding whether to make this change permanent.
I do not want to alienate or lose any participants, but I do want to encourage you to log in. We kept the Sound Off open as a convenience for people so they would not have to log in, but we still expected participants to identify themselves in some meaningful way. Identification is important in order to provide the continuity necessary to facilitate communication. Really there has never been a legitimate excuse for refusing to provide a consistent identifier since these names allowed you to remain fully anonymous if you so wished.
Too many people not only declined to log in but also declined to replace their system generated name with something more recognizable. I invited people to explain themselves but nobody provided a legitimate reason for failing to type in a unique name, and those users continued to ignore my requests for compliance with this simple and unobtrusive request.
I have found the contributions from these “generic” users to be interesting and relevant, so I implore them to continue to participate by creating a login account. You can be assured that your real identity will remain fully secure, so there is no reason to not do it.
Anyone having trouble creating an account or logging in is welcome to email me at steelballs@thenetmail.com.
