[quote=Griever]
"We want to be identified, even on the internet. "God is within. Would you not agree that any site which requires us to assume an identity in the form of a username - Griever, mdk, whatever - strips anonymity from us by default? If we wanted to be anonymous, which I believe is a good thing, how do we go about that effectively, while still avoiding all the necessary pitfalls like:-Your online persona gaining slow recognition within a finite community-Repetition which will inevitably lead to recognition-IP-recognition on admin-side of the server -Confrontation leading to recognition-Roleplaying leading to recognition-Etc.
[/quote]

To an extent. If your loss of anonymity was stictly involuntary, though, you'd expect people to seize their chances to start over. Take Turt, for example -- permabanned from oldguild, comes here and elects to keep the same name. He could've registered as HobboBono, no one would've been the wiser, and he wouldn't have started out on thin ice. 

Or (to segue and not to associate), consider the saga of Darth Warman. If the goal was to cheekily-sexually-harass people from a curtain of anonymity, why use variations on the same name over and over?

And apologies again for mentioning *anybody* in the same breath as Warman. If I'm talking about 'a certain type of Internet user' in this whole line of thinking, I mean to include myself. 

Point is, we're not locked in if we're embracing the cage. We like our notoriety. We like our smug, undeserved sense of accomplishment. We like our circumspect kudos when we waste breath on shitty reviews for amateur fiction. We love our identity.