FanNation

Fannation is an interesting place isn’t it? In this forum, you have your regular posters or “regulahs”, your consistently infrequent posters, your sages, your wise crackers, your drive-by-ers, your meddlers, your faceless, opinionated, loudmouthed, biased sports-nut posters and all the other types in between.  Yet, somehow it works.  We all play off one another and usually its all good – a semi real portrayal of society. Then again, some times it doesn’t work and certain folks have to be asked nicely to leave (or not so nicely).  Still, these acid, cancerous posters don’t completely disrupt our society here on FN. 

So what do the powers that be consider to be disruptive to this community?  What shakes the very foundation of friendships and relationships that we’ve built in this space?  Identity fraud…imagine that.  However, it’s not all types of identity fraud that incenses the masses and the mods, it’s the creation of multiple personalities.  If you’re faceless (no avatar) and your account is hidden from the public eye, then that’s ok.  Even if you’re disruptive you’ll enjoy a certain amount of freedom and length of existence.

So why is it that in a place where your identity is an avatar and any other personal or fictitious information that you choose to display in you profile, that creating a second identity is frowned upon?  It could be that having multiple personalities is akin to admitting fraud.  It could be because additional identities are viewed as having a negative intent.  One profile “is” you and the other isn’t, you can’t have them both.  Funny, in a way this makes sense to me in a business sense…even though every profile in this space has just as much chance of being fake as the next one.  There is no way of telling which is which, but if you have more than one, then there is the assumption of an inherent negative intent.

There has to be ground rules and this one makes sense from a business/liability management sense.  As is anything in life, there are obvious exceptions to the rules.

In my personal experience as a once owner of another personality in this space, there was a lot of good clean fun to be had with the additional personality.  You could slip out of your current personality and approach a discussion from another angle – something that the public might not accept if you remained behind the same familiar mask (user account).  In my case, most of the folks I was talking with, knew that I had changed masks and went along with it.  For those who didn’t, I tried to leave enough bread crumbs for them to pick up my trail.  My intent was never negative, nor was the intent of the other users that I knew, that had multiple accounts.  They would use their masks as tools for running gags or running off the cancerous posters who’s sole intent was to disrupt a group.  Whether they took the forms as clowns, sport figures, silly avatars or even a giant rock, they were used for the benefit of the group or the discussion, never the harm…though sometimes that took some splainin’ to a confused member or two.

If you accept these cases as the good side or light side of the force, then you know there has to be a dark side – the side that FN has to manage as it sees fit.  Certain users, with the most malicious, hateful intent used multiple identities to harm others or regain access to FN after being shown the door.  We all know who some of these folks were and saw their disruptive nature devalue the space were occupying at the time.  So we had to have more rules.  It’s that simple. It is these folks that make you appreciate the moderators and their supervisors who’s efforts to keep this space safe for all ages (over 13 I think) and noise free.

So, lets all say thanks to the Mods for their fun depriving efforts to keeping this space as evil-doer-free as possible…a little freedom has been sacrificed for a good cause.