A community manager shouldn’t be anonymous. They need to be seen as a real person. You can’t form a community based around anonymity. Trust only forms when human relationships are involved. How can you build rapport with someone who only calls themselves ‘admin’ and who refuses to share any information about themselves?

Depends on the forum to a point but everybody else as anonymity when the post things of a personal nature so why should the admin not have the same luxury ? Especially given there will probably be a friend or two on the forum, never able to express experience on things of a “delicate nature” like incest as an example, the community is the loser because of it.
Plus if you are serious of maybe selling your site one day for the big dollars who wants to buy a site hinged around one person-you the seller ?

Usernames do not mean a great deal to me, if someone wants to have another for the purpose of free expression and privacy thats fine by me, its the content next to the usernames that is of prime concern.

Love the site Martin

Thank you

http://www.icann.org/announcements/advisory-10may02.htm

Michelle

“The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) operates as the governing body for domain name registrations, and has certain requirements that must be met by a registrar if they wish to be an ICANN Accredited registrar. The requirements for domain contact information are listed on this page:

Registrar Advisory Concerning Whois Data Accuracy

As you can see in that document, it is required that the registrant of the domain provide the name and postal address of the registrant contact, as well as the name, postal address, e-mail address, voice telephone number, and (where available) fax number of the technical and administrative contacts for the domain.”

So it is most definitely against ICANN’s rules and could result in me losing my domain names. Would they bother going after little ole me? Probably not. But I’m not going to risk it. Thanks for the discussion. It was interesting, but I’m going to leave my info alone.

Michelle

I can’t see there being a dispute with your domain name – if there ever is, you then simply update the info with your genuine address information. I am not suggesting you ever use a name other than your own as the registered owner – only the street address info.

Michelle

Smiley – That’s interesting information, thanks for sharing!

Seems all you have to do is e-mail and ask for your address to be hidden.