Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft and other MMO games, has announced that they will no longer allow anonymous postings to their official forum:
Existing posts are not affected, but many WoW subscribers are concerned about the privacy implications of the move. Emails complaining about the decision are already flooding in — to El Reg’s inbox — so one can imagine the furore on Battle.net forums.
As one Reg reader says: “So every man, woman and child who plays World of Warcraft or the upcoming Starcraft 2 will only be able to post on their forums if they’re perfectly happy for anyone who may want to know what their name is. The mind boggles at the security implications from social engineering passwords, email addresses and account names or even safety if people have ex partners or stalkers etc. And then there’s the idiots who you meet in the games themselves who can now take their abuse to real life with just a little googling and rare name or background info.”
No doubt, Blizzard has considered this and is willing to wave goodbye to anonymous forum participants: damn the traffic — or dam the traffic? It simply wants people to behave themselves, to create a new and different kind of online gaming environment — one that’s highly social, and which provides an ideal place for gamers to form long-lasting, meaningful relationships. “
I’d have thought that a viable compromise between the current situation (anyone being able to post anonymously) and the “solution” would be to allow registered users to post under a pseudonym. Blizzard probably doesn’t want to police their forums too heavily, and believe that removing anonymity will automatically reduce the worst excesses with no further policing required from them. Well, it’s a theory.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Lei Caine, Nicholas Russon. Nicholas Russon said: Blizzard to remove anonymity in attempt to reduce trolling in their official forums – http://is.gd/diBtj […]
Pingback by Tweets that mention Blizzard to de-anonymize their user forum « Quotulatiousness -- Topsy.com — July 7, 2010 @ 08:27
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
Comment by MacMan_ru — July 13, 2010 @ 19:30