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ReadAnonymously
MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | CategoriesMost online communities allow people to ReadAnonymously, even if they do not allow people to PostAnonymously.
Some exceptions:
- Some communities have a WhoIsOnline feature, which reveals which CommunityMembers are logged on, even if they are not posting, merely reading. Instant messenging software such as ICQ also provides this functionality, as does InternetRelayChat.
- Some communities have a public version of SubscribedChanges, which allows you to determine what threads or pages a reader is particularly interested in.
On meatball we encourage those who do not wish to read anonymously to post on RecentVisitors.
On meatball
You could go one step further towards full disclosure on MeatballWiki, and post the IPs of those who read, as well. That would close the circle completely.
This is true. I could amend the HitCounts script accordingly, although I'm not going to do this without a discussion. -- SunirShah
- That would be a pretty rotten thing to do to viewers (and possibly illegal, but I wouldn't cross my heart on that). The simple way to have everyone be happy would be to use ID numbers assigned by MeatballWiki instead of IP addresses or hostnames to tag AnonymousDonor's. That would respect their desire to contribute anonymously but allow the community to EnforceResponsibility.
I will not support any attempt to publish the addresses of Meatball readers. (I would rather shut the site down.) The only exception would be general statistics like the number of unique readers, or the number of readers in different countries. --CliffordAdams
I didn't really expect making reader's IPs public would fly, but I was prepared to be surprised to the contrary.
In a sense, it's interesting to see the limits placed on VulnerabilityToCommunity. To the degree that one is vulnerable to a DenialOfService attack, one is vulnerable to much more than the community of posters who have accepted community standards. And, again, those who contribute via small ISPs are more vulnerable than those who contribute through much larger providers for whom such attacks are more quotidian and more trivial--a DoS attack is a more credible threat to my tiny and quite vulnerable DSL bandwidth, but the same attack against an AOL point of presence would probably be more annoyance than threat.