Anonymity & The Lack Thereof

[shannon_a]

In the last couple of weeks I had the same odd experience, twice: I got mail from someone wanting to get their name taken off of something at RPGnet. I didn't ask either person "why", but I can guess the reason: they didn't want the RPGnet page coming up when potential bosses googled their name when considering them for a job. And RPGnet is a big, popular site, so it comes up early on Google results, so I can understand the concern.

For one person he wanted his name taken off of a review that he'd written for RPGnet. I didn't have a problem with that, particularly since he'd just asked for his last name to be removed and it didn't actually offer any additional context to the review. Now we all know that in this world of caching and historical backups, it's never going to actually be gone ... but it might pull it off of the search results.

The other person wanted his name taken off of a review where it was mentioned that he'd *contributed to the product*. That was a harder call because it involved the core honesty of our underlying data. He wanted to pretend that he'd never contributed to a product that he had. Ultimately I told him no, and I'm pretty sure he was furious at that.

But, if I'd told him yes, where would it stop? If I remove an author's name from a product because he doesn't want to be associated with RPGs any more, do I later remove an author's name from a product that he's embarrassed by, or do I remove an author's name from a product because the publisher is now embarrassed by him? Worse, in a world of user-submitted reviews and index entries, do I have to catch his name every time someone submitted it again, and then remove it before we publish? I wouldn't even know how to keep track of that!

Granted, the latter issue wasn't a problem here because the credit was "additional contributions by", or something like that, but I thought the questions of veracity and truthful were nonetheless important.

Which I suppose means that in this brave new digital world, if you put your name to something, you'd better be sure that you'll be willing to stand proudly next to it in the future.

Comments

[mylescorcoran]

I think you made the right decision in both cases. In the first, as the reviewer could, like many people, choose to review under a by-line as he/she wished, and in the second because of the reasons you state. The information is in the public domain, and it's a bit late now to be worried about the credits of an already published work.

[cwricheson.livejournal.com]

The former is easy for me to understand, but not so much the latter. I suspect it would have stopped with that one request, unless you often get requests like that to remove information. Still, with all the work on the Gaming Index and the like it seems at cross purposes with the current goals of RPG.net to remove information about who worked on X game. Besides, how much could it hurt someone to have them mentioned as having "contributed to" a project? If bad comes to worse and the boss asks they can always say "No, that's a different John Smith" and be done with it.

There was an interesting conversation about this topic on theRPGsite recently, while discussing user handles and reputations, where a lot of folk revealed that they didn't use their real names on RPG fora or even with RPG products because they didn't want it following them to job interviews and the like. So I think your analysis is spot on! :)

[bobmungovan.livejournal.com]

I also agree that you did the right thing in the appropriate cases. Your last line is absolutely true when it comes to all aspects of associating yourself with something.