Anonymous Cowards Anonymous are not welcome on Slashdot yet

On August 9, Slashdot, an aggregator of new technologies, has quietly removed one of its first features, accessible to all visitors since its inception in 1997: the ability to post comments as "Anonymous coward". And although the feature came back within five days, she returned to a largely nerve-free format.

Users can now access the "Anonymous Coward" feature only if they are logged in with a valid account, thus associating a form of use followed for all users of the site. Slashdot administrators say this change is currently "temporary".

"Absolutely, only" to fight against spam

The decision comes after an increase in public pressure against anonymous picture services, especially 8chan, where the manifest of a deadly shooter would have been posted. This pressure prompted cloud provider Cloudflare (and other replacement services) to stop providing services to the sites.

In an email interview, Logan Abbott, president of Slashdot, said that this decision had nothing to do with the actions taken by Cloudflare to cut ties with 8chan, Daily Stormer or other controversial sites . Instead, he says the change is "absolutely, only" meant to fight spam.

"The spam was just too important and came from extremely dedicated trolls," Abbott said. He said large text screens and SEO spammers were among the site's most notorious posters. Abbott says that he does not know why everyone thinks they have the "right" to publish anonymously on someone's website. It also highlights Slashdot's account creation process which currently requires a minimum of personal data, although creating an account requires a verified email address and keeps track of the IP address of the account. # 39; user.

Abbott says the move is to make the site's existing moderation system more productive. The Slashdot community is largely a moderator, and users with a high karma rating on the site are more likely to be assigned "change points" when connected. These points can be used for a limited number of votes to promote or bury other users. user comments, while assigning values ​​such as "insightful", "funny", "overrated" or "flamebait".

With a seemingly growing amount of spam, most Slashdot users were spending the bulk of their change points on reducing the number of spam emails instead of moderating the comments of legitimate users, Abbott said.

"Technically, it informs them"

Community members certainly noticed the change, although in the absence of an official announcement message to discuss it, they took the initiative to raise the issue in unrelated discussions with Slashdot.

An angry user broke into a thread about "the golden age of open source," commented the user of Slashdot, theritis, "I think that disable Anonymous comments will have more advantages than disadvantages (for example, by giving those who manage the site more importance working on the prevention of hateful spam or troll) and that was the good Certainly better than asking for a captcha for each message. "

"The improvement in the quality of the discussion so far speaks for itself," Abbott said.

Interestingly, if you disguise yourself as an "anonymous coward" for a particular message, the resulting karma score will not affect the main connected account. Abbott told Ars: "We have not made a big announcement because it's temporary.We see how it goes for a week or two.If someone tries to publish anonymously, he posts message saying that It has been disabled, technically it informs them. "

A public survey conducted in 2016 in Slashdot asked its readers: "Should Slashdot remove the possibility of publishing anonymously?" The results of 13,669 respondents were a "no" resounding to 71%. "Yes" and "All my posts are written by Cowboy Neil" (a Slashdot joke) are 13% and 14% respectively.

The former Slashdot contributor, Jon Katz, wrote a lengthy defense in 1999 on the site's Anonymous Coward feature. I equate that flaming it is to be interesting. "