Lack of interest Alter Ego

[jondoe0069]

I think a cool feature would be to allow users to post as an Alter Ego, similar to an "Anonymize Me" feature. I have a forum where users sometimes create two accounts - one to network and be professional and another to use when starting threads that spill secrets, start rumors, rant, etc. It's a somewhat political/ union related forum, if that makes it make more sense.

I think it would be interesting to essentially allow users to check a box to post as an 'Alter Ego' which would be a public user name with it's own post count, but no other info publicly associated with it and no public users could know it was associated with their account. On the back end, the main account and this "Alter Ego" name would be associated, however in the view of admins and/ or mods. Also, any ban, infraction etc. would apply to the parent account. Creation of this account would simply mean typing in a user name that isn't already in use on the forum.

Also, once they posted in a thread or started one and checked the box to post as their alter-ego, it would automatically associate that thread with their alter-ego and their replies would automatically come from that name.

It sounds confusing, sort of, but it could be a pretty cool feature and would probably make regular, known members way more likely to create juicy and/ or controversial content for your forum since they wouldn't be afraid to tarnish their own reputation and wouldn't have to do too much work to create and log into a separate account.

Any thoughts?

 

[Trombones13]

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why exactly would I want my members stirring up controversy and "juicy" drama on my forum? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, to be frank.

 

[silendreamer]

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why exactly would I want my members stirring up controversy and "juicy" drama on my forum? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, to be frank.

I think if you allocate certain forums for drama ... and let everyone know that there is going to be drama in there ..it will not become such a disaster

I see this suggestion as very innovative Never seen before on any other forum software. Got to see what the xF team thinks about this one

 

[jondoe0069]

Maybe I'm missing the point here, but why exactly would I want my members stirring up controversy and "juicy" drama on my forum? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me, to be frank.

Well I don't necessarily mean fighting with each other or that sort of drama. It's more like a political/ industry forum, so an example would be if someone wanted to release public information, but didn't want the release to be associated with them due to the possibility of backlash, injury to their reputation, etc., they could post and discuss it as an Alter Ego that isn't publicly linked to their account. It could also be used if someone wanted to question something or rant about it publicly without worrying about hurting their reputation. Since my forum is and industry/ political forum, a lot of networking happens on the forum, so a lot of the members know each other well and it's not hard to figure out who someone is just based on looking at their friendships and posts. Instead of having someone create a fresh account requiring mod approval on the first few posts to post stuff anonymously, they could just post as their alter-ego. It's more for convenience for the user and to encourage them to give our forum some 'heard it hear first' content without having to feed it to us by email anonymously.