Blizzard to take away any anonymity you had left

[Karathyriel]

This is frightening, Vephriel.
Did you see what info was found rather quick?

I am so continuing to delete my posts...

[Palladiamorsdeus]

There is a service you can pay for online, in fact it has a free trial, that let's you do at the very least a location and criminal background check on people whose names you have. Background checks aren't much harder to come by. This is all information that is already out there, and at the fingertips of anyone who know's or wants to know how to go looking for it.

[Saturo]

There is a service you can pay for online, in fact it has a free trial, that let's you do at the very least a location and criminal background check on people whose names you have. Background checks aren't much harder to come by. This is all information that is already out there, and at the fingertips of anyone who know's or wants to know how to go looking for it.

I'll perform that service for free, too.

[Vephriel]

You can type your own name in at a website like http://pipl.com/ and get a frightening amount of results and information. :/

[Saturo]

You can type your own name in at a website like http://pipl.com/ and get a frightening amount of results and information. :/

According to that site I'm 36 years old.

[Vephriel]

Aaaand the official forum thread has just hit OVER 9000 replies.

No joke.

[Mania]

You can type your own name in at a website like http://pipl.com/ and get a frightening amount of results and information. :/

According to that site I'm 36 years old.

I'm either 65 or 36. But assuming that you know that I'm not 65, the majority of the rest is good.

... Hey, I'd forgotten that I lived at that address for 6 months before I left for Atlanta! Cool.

In my case, I'm a lot less concerned about someone tracking me down -- my name is across the web in various places and I even have public resumes with an address and phone number. What I don't want, however, is people connecting the WoW portion of my life to that resume.

[Kalliope]

Well, this is fun; I'm deleting crap I haven't used in years to cover my trail.

Yeah, I'm an internet ninja. Rawr.

[Kaswryn]

You can type your own name in at a website like http://pipl.com/ and get a frightening amount of results and information. :/

O.O according to that site........I don't exist

[Mania]

O.O according to that site........I don't exist

Lucky!

[Razzy]

-facepalm-

[Kaswryn]

O.O according to that site........I don't exist

Lucky!

That's a reward for having no life outside of a small town I guess.

[Palladiamorsdeus]

Apparently I am violating parole right about now.....

Okay, so my name is fairly common.

[Chrizesu]

Due to that site I now want to entirely change my name.

[Kalliope]

I want to be able to delete stuff that was put out there half a lifetime ago. >_<

And I mean that literally....sigh.

[Adam-Savage]

Aaaand the official forum thread has just hit OVER 9000 replies.

No joke.

507 pages!

[Aleu]

According to that site, I'm either 34, 61, 35 or 41.

>_> Go figure. XD

Anyways, you can only hope Blizz might overlook it. If not... Oh my the storm will only get worse.

[Kryte]

This... is ridiculous. Yes, the WoW forums have a large amount of unhelpful or offensive material posted. But the damage caused by trolling pales in comparison to the potential danger of having real names posted, and the destruction of community that comes out of it.

An open discussion requires the freedom from fear and reprisal. The measures Blizzard is taking in introducing the real ID to forum posting serve to squelch anyone who is part of a minority group (be it in gender, ethnicity, sexuality, sex, etc) or who supports an unpopular position. Popularity or commonness should not become a measure of rightness.

This sort of thing destroys communities. People who are otherwise helpful will be disinclined to continue community participation as a result of having their identities connected with their forum posts. Life and ideas cannot flourish in such an environment. Trolls are infinitely preferable to me.

[Tygamoon]

So yeah, I was thinking about this more and have come to the conclusion that I will not be buying Cata and continuing to play any online game of theirs. I know I can choose to NOT use the forums and still play but this is a huge breech of trust that I've had with this company. I've got one last time card left to use so I think what I'll do is dress up each of my loved toons in the outfit that best expresses their personality and logging out for the last time in the next 2 months. I will be using my real life money to show them how I feel about this change by spending it on another game company. I know I'm just one drop falling out of their massive bucket but I have a feeling that many other drops will be falling too.

[Rhyela]

We also plan to add a number of other features designed to make reading the forums more enjoyable and to empower players with tools to improve the quality of forum discussions. Players will have the ability to rate up or rate down posts so that great topics and replies stand out from the not-so-great; low-rated posts will appear dimmer to show that the community feels that they don't contribute effectively to the conversation, and Blizzard's community team will be able to quickly and easily locate highly rated posts to participate in or to highlight discussions that players find worthwhile.

In addition, individual topics will be threaded by context, meaning replies to specific posts will be grouped together, making it easier for players to keep track of multiple conversations within a thread. We're also adding a way for Blizzard posters to "broadcast" important messages forums-wide , to help communicate breaking news to the community in a clear and timely fashion. Beyond that, we're improving our forum search function to make locating interesting topics easier and help lower the number of redundant threads, and we have more planned as well.

Link

They should have just stopped there. I mean, if you look at simple websites like wowhead, being able to downrate or uprate(?) posts goes a long way in weeding out the garbage posts. Forcing people to either post with their real name or not post at all is going too far. I think I'd be happy if they let us use a username (like how xboxlive does). Yeah, it's sort of the same thing as a troll rolling a level one alt, but I still think it'd help. That username would be attached to their account so any post made would be under that one username. No alt-rolling to post some stupid comment. Why on earth do they need our real names to do that? This is just very yucky indeed. I didn't post often to begin with, but now I won't be posting at all.....ever. Dumb move, Blizz. I foresee them losing a lot of subscriptions if they do this, and I would likely be one of them. With Star Wars: ToR coming out soon, I'd be perfectly happy playing that. Heck, I'd rather even dust off my old Aion account.