[clug] [OT] a pet peeve, was Re: does splice work?

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> writes:
>
> One of my pet peeves is when people don't/won't identify themselves on
> lists...

If you think that's bad...

A month or so ago, an argument broke out in the Haskell community
because someone was annoyed that the policy for usernames on Hackage
(the Haskell equivalent of CPAN, etc.) was that they be camel-cased
versions of your real name (e.g. my username is IvanMiljenovic).  These
people thought that this wasn't fair, etc.

Now, for those that had an alternate identity online that everyone knew
them by ("friend names", etc. that they preferred rather than the name
on their birth certificate/passport), that's one thing.  But people were
wanting to be able to use random nick-names to preserve their
anonymity (though I don't understand about why you'd want to remain
anonymous about uploading a package to a source repository unless you
are not legally allowed to do so because it isn't your code).

Part of the reason that Hackage's policy existed was because it had come
out of an academic rather than a hacker community culture, and you
should be able to attribute who did what.

One reason why I use variants of my name as IRC names, etc. are because
I sometimes get annoyed trying to match up someone's nickname on IRC to
their email address to the maintainer name for a package.  As such, it
can be hard to track down who is responsible for what.

So, that's my 2c; if you want to take part in a "serious" community (as
opposed to some random people doing stuff together on WoW, etc.)
especially in the long term, make it easy for people to associate who
you are, etc.  If for some reason you have to/prefer using a nick-name
of some sort, at least be consistent so it's easier to match up your
various contributions in the different forms of communication, etc.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com