What's your identity worth to you?

[mietze]

I’m not protective. I haven’t talked with people to the degree that I used to say even 10 years ago, but it’s not out of fear so much as being boring (in the throes of parenting, business, politics,ect). I do not have any illusions about people being able to find out stuff about me, as many people here know I had the recent experience of a man I met at summer camp when I was a teenager that I had not contacted in 30 years show up at one of my public political meetings to “catch up” with me, after stalking me at my business. He found me through two name changes (three if you count first name changes).

I have met over 50 mush folks in my years in gaming. :). I am always up for meeting more. I’ve opened up my home as crash space/temporary living for mush friends (rather than acquaintances) or people vouched for many times and taken up many people’s offers of hospitality. I find the larger mush community far physically safer than say the state meeting of any volunteer or professional organization.

But. I don’t want to be contacted by game administrators just because, I don’t really want people contacting me outside without my welcome/permission/sharing with them that I would like that, and I don’t want to be spammed. So any game/admin/person that engages in personally uninvited communication (or continues after I’ve made it known I’d like it to cease) will quickly be dumped by me.

[Haven]

I am protective. Mostly because MU* people are insane. The people who react poorly to that statement are the ones I am always looking out for!

[RnMissionRun]

1. In twenty years of MUing there have been 4 people who knew my RL name and one of those doesn't count because I knew her IRL before I started MUing. I don't care that people know that I live in VA but I'm not going to narrow it down any further than that.

2. My religion, sexual orientation, etc are no one's business but my own. It especially has no relevance on pretendy fun time games where I am only interacting with others vicariously through a made up character.

3. I don't do social media at all. I do not voice chat or share personal photos with people that I do not know.

4. The only email address you're going to get from me is my 20 year old AOL address that I use when I need a disposable email address. It has never been associated with the "real me" in any way. All incoming mail is automatically filtered to the trash.

5. I don't have any skeletons in my closet, so revealing who I am/was on other games is no big deal.

[faraday]

I'm not sure what value a few data points on a poll are. In real social media people fall all along a privacy spectrum, from "I'm a ghost" to "My life is an open book" and I would expect MU folks to be the same. I do think that the Bad Actor history of MUSHing does tend to sway people a little more towards the privacy side though.

FWIW, I fall more on the open side because I am a writer and it's kind of a PITA to maintain a separate identity for a pen name. I've found that my gaming and game-code experience is a selling point in my industry and not a drawback. But I get why other people are more privacy conscious, for reasons from industry stigma to security clearances to Bad Experiences.

Though I do think that many MUSHers are irrationally resistant to supplying emails. It takes sixty seconds to create a burner Gmail account for spam and even my mom has managed it. The entire internet runs off of email validation, and I seriously do not understand the resistance against it in MU-land.

@wildbaboons said in What's your identity worth to you?:

I don't mind sharing who my alts are usually, but so long as I am the one doing the sharing. It's why I wish the profile piece of Ares was opt-in on sharing.

There's actually a reason why it's not, which I bring up (even though it's kinda off-topic) because it may be relevant to @Arkandel's master plans.

Selective privacy is ridiculously hard.

Think about Facebook and it's gazillion privacy settings for who can see what. Have you ever tried to explain that to someone who isn't very tech-savvy? It's insanity.

In Ares, for instance, your handle appears next to your name on channels. <Public> Cate (@Faraday) says, "Yo.". If only some of the people can see the @Faraday bit it gets weird, because nobody knows who can see what. All it takes is one person slipping on channel: "So Fara - when will that be done?" and all of a sudden you're outed. Plus, as soon as you register an alt then the game admins can see it. And we all know that game admins are super-trustworthy about keeping alt info secret, right?

So after a great deal of prototyping and careful consideration, I decided it was best to make handles public and not give people a false illusion of privacy. The only safe way to opt out is to just not have a handle. Even having a handle but only selectively linking alts is not foolproof because your IP follows you.

[Haven]

@faraday said in What's your identity worth to you?:

And we all know that game admins are super-trustworthy about keeping alt info secret, right?

Game admins are the soul of discretion. And hot TS.

[Apos]

@faraday said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Though I do think that many MUSHers are irrationally resistant to supplying emails. It takes sixty seconds to create a burner Gmail account for spam and even my mom has managed it. The entire internet runs off of email validation, and I seriously do not understand the resistance against it in MU-land.

So when I was getting started, I remember the violent reaction to what I thought wasn't a big deal, requiring an email to make registration fast and easy. People freaked out, so I was like, 'gosh, there must be a ton of MU players that won't use an email under any circumstances, even a throw away'. So I set up a special process to approve someone that was uncomfortable giving any email, spent a shitload of time on it.

Currently, I'm on character application #1809 on Arx and I've had to do that special process for the violently email-less exactly zero times.

[lordbelh]

I remember that I used to have issues with providing (or receiving) too much RL private information. It was born out of a general desire to keep my real life and my online world compartmentalized, having seen early some bad examples of people who'd lost all perspective. With time I stopped being too worried about it, though. Which is not to say I tend to be awfully forthcoming, but I don't shut down conversations about these things anymore, either.

1. I don't really care. My e-mail address does contain half my name, sort of. (Its written backwards and missing one part.)

2. I'm indifferent to people knowing my social statuses, too.

3. I can count the number of times I've shared a picture of myself on one hand. I don't think I've ever asked for someone else's picture. I've only video chatted with one person that I met through RP, and only a couple of times at that. I've never met anyone in person from RP (though I also live off the beaten path as far as RPer hot-spots go). I do voice-chat sometimes, though.

4. People can have my e-mail address if they need it.

5. I don't care if people know who I am on games. I listed my alts a while back on MSB, though I haven't updated that in a while (I haven't been RPing for a goodly long while now for various reasons). Admittedly I haven't always lived up to my own standards on behavior in the past, and it is an easy temptation to simply shed your old skin and try on a fresh and new one. But ultimately I prefer to just own it, good or bad. Not to say that reason to wish privacy is why everybody (or a majority, or many at all) might want privacy of alts, but that's where I get my occasional temptations. Mind, I do often like starting a game as an unknown - its harder to grab scenes or become involved in rp, but it also offers opportunities to break old patterns and forge some fresh new stories and learn some new perspectives. But I never really try to pretend to not be me, so much as avoid announcing it loud at the start.

Anyway, tldr; eh.

[Nemesis]

1: I typically never share my real name online. Even my github account has a business name, not a personal name. All the email addresses that I use for anything but business have no name or a name that reflects the email address (for gmail and yahoo, where a First/Last name are required). I even pay extra to my domain registrar for that "anonymous registration" protection service.

2: I don't really care about gender/religion/etc. I'm vocal about the fact that I've been an ordained minister since 2000 and that I don't subscribe to canonical or secular "religion" as much as spirituality. I'm also vocal about my politics. That said, I wouldn't want it advertised by a 3rd party unless that 3rd party is a dating site.

3: I don't trust anyone who won't voicechat. This may be oldschool because that's where I learned it - staffing IRC and MU* servers in the mid to late 1990s. As often as not a phone conversation was required as part of the staff interview for MUs, and more often than not it was required to become an IRCop. Moreover, a 5 minute voice chat tends to accomplish as much or more than a 5 page email. I don't post pictures of myself online except at freelancing sites where I make real, actual money, and then it's just a head-shot attached to my profile. I don't facebook or twitter and I never did.

4: I was email stalked by Red Queen after quitting as her coder at RER. Over a decade before that, the first incarnation of WORA got hold of one of my email addresses (which was also my IRC nickname everywhere I was an oper) and used it to create a puppet account by that name which they then trolled their own boards with. This resulted in a problems for me over a few years, whenever I used that email address for registration MUs, and wasn't resolved until somebody on a MU staff corps finally acted like an adult and pointed out what WORA had been up to. So the email addresses I use for MU "registrations" or MU-related forums now are always created for that purpose on the spot, or a few at a time may be consolidated into a single throwaway account.

5: I've always held the opinion that anyone who wants or needs to hide who their alts are is up to no good. Whenever I have a wizbit or access to the shell, I will also siteban or lock out via iptables any IP Address which turns out to belong to a relay/proxy agency for the same reason.

[Roz]

@nemesis said in What's your identity worth to you?:

5: I've always held the opinion that anyone who wants or needs to hide who their alts are is up to no good. Whenever I have a wizbit or access to the shell, I will also siteban or lock out via iptables any IP Address which turns out to belong to a relay/proxy agency for the same reason.

How do you feel about players who keep their alts private due to being stalked?

[faraday]

@apos said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Currently, I'm on character application #1809 on Arx and I've had to do that special process for the violently email-less exactly zero times.

That's reassuring but hardly conclusive. I mean, setting aside the pages of MSB posts on the subject, I've personally spoken to people of the opinion that: "I simply won't play on a game that requires email registration". They're more likely to just walk away than to jump through extra hoops for a special process. They're probably a minority (and hopefully diminishing over time as more of the younger generation comes in), but they do exist.

ETA: But just to add more data to support your general point... The Ares player handle system allows you to enter an email for password resets. Strictly voluntary. 90% of players have set one.

[3543thrh67]

@faraday said in What's your identity worth to you?:

@apos said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Currently, I'm on character application #1809 on Arx and I've had to do that special process for the violently email-less exactly zero times.

That's reassuring but hardly conclusive. I mean, setting aside the pages of MSB posts on the subject, I've personally spoken to people of the opinion that: "I simply won't play on a game that requires email registration". They're more likely to just walk away than to jump through extra hoops for a special process. They may be a minority (and hopefully diminishing over time as more of the younger generation comes in), but they do exist.

Yup, I know people who will not join Arx because of the email thing. I just use a throw away email for Arx

[Apos]

Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.

[Killer Klown]

I don't particularly care; trying to keep up secret identities or what have you just sounds like too much work for me. Also, if someone has a problem with me I'd rather they know who I am ahead of time. I tend to be pretty free about most things regarding myself.
That said, I also tend to be somewhat of an introvert. I don't really initiate conversations much, and there's only a small handful of people I even engage in page conversations with. I don't have a Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media sort of account apart from (if it even counts) a Skype login that I'm never on and a LinkedIn account that I never update. Even back in the day, I never got into the Geocities or Angelfire whatnots; and at present my Steam and Blizzard friends lists consist of two people; one of which is a RL friend.

[ixokai]

1. I don't really care. I've been "ixokai" since I was 14, which was more then two decades ago, and anyone with even a little skill knows my address. They don't know which apartment I am in or my actual phone number, because fuck you WHOIS, I'm not THAT stupid.

2. I deeply do not care.

3. I don't like my photo being taken; there's a few out there but they are rare. I will almost never voice chat with anyone; this comes down to a slightly odd issue I have with sound. I find I don't process sound like everyone else. There's no background sound: there's either sound I completely focus on, or sound that is all a blur. I can't do audiobooks, for example, because you know like, needing to drive. I can't be on a conference call and do anything on the computer. The moment I have to listen is when I can't do anything but listen. So: I don't voice chat or anything like that. But its not identity related.

4. I care only insofar as I want to kill spam. Thus, for people, I'm me@ixokai.io. For a shady porn site, I'm yoursitename@junk.ixokai.io, and *@junk.ixokai.io auto-forwards into a junk folder. I can still get the shady porn site's activation mail but it doesn't bother my inbox.

5. I am so completely incapable of hiding 'myself' on games the whole 'alt secrecy' stuff just vooshes over my head. I used to care about this because when I was very young I got into some shady stuff so not being me from one game to another was something important to me, but that shady shit happened when I was a teenager and now that I am 10 days past my 37th birthday, I don't have time for shady. Now I maintain a quasi-updated (haven't checked lately) Playlist here and at some point when I'm on a game I do all ': = ixokai!' to everyone, just in case I know someone. If anyone has any peeves with me these days I'd rather they know who I am we can happily coexist by just not fucking with eachother.

[Coin]

Don't really care about any of it.

I don't even have privacy settings on my FB.

[Arkandel]

@thenomain said in What's your identity worth to you?:

There is nothing you can ask for from us that we can't easily fake, unless you're asking for a mailing address or phone number in which case you're going to lose a lot of people.

I am far less concerned with people whose technical familiarity allows them to easily maneuver around trivial limitations without much trouble and more with those who are skeptical about participating in the community here in the first place, and for whom having that extra step of providing a 'real' e-mail account to register might be what decides it for them.

In other words I want to make life a little harder for trolls, but not at the expense of legitimate, casual newcomers.

[Arkandel]

@icanbeyourmuse said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Yup, I know people who will not join Arx because of the email thing. I just use a throw away email for Arx

Double post, but do you know why? I mean, what's the reason they won't use mailinator or something for this? Is it technical know-how or a moral clause of some sort?

[ixokai]

@arkandel I know a certain subset are rabidly against the idea that the game owner can ask to know 'who they are'. Most make noises on way or the other; privacy, history, etc. They are offended by the very presumption one would ask for an email address, not hindered by some lack of technical ability to use a throw-away address.

They're nuts, in short.

[faraday]

@ixokai said in What's your identity worth to you?:

They are offended by the very presumption one would ask for an email address, not hindered by some lack of technical ability to use a throw-away address.

Yeah, from the polling I did for Ares it's usually either principle ("You shouldn't need to know that! You must be dumb and/or shady!") or just not wanting to be spammed and not wanting to be bothered creating a MU burner.

@apos said in What's your identity worth to you?:

Oh yeah I'm sure they exist, I just think it's so small and so niche that it's not worth it to factor them into design decisions.

I guess it depends. Unlike Arx, most MU*s are pretty small. The idea of potentially alienating up to 10% of your already-small population seems like something many games would want to factor into their design decisions - even if that decision is ultimately "screw it, we're using email".

[Arkandel]

@faraday I think it's also a step beyond that; there is a type of player who doesn't make a fuss, who won't go to staff and complain first or even leave an "I don't like this policy, I'm out" note upon leaving. They just leave.

Those are arguably people no game should want to lose regardless of size, not because they care about the playerbase or even because they'd consider altering the policy in question, but because they never have the chance to examine it first.

These are just lost players, a silent minority alienated by one cog you - as staff - are never given the chance to question whether it belongs, or if it can be removed or... what. Maybe the cog belongs there. Maybe you haven't given it a moment's thought in your life and never realized it'd be offensive to anyone.