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Overall I like this TOTW just because so many people come on here and get mad about the conversations. You could call it trolling, cyberbullying, people not being able to take criticism ("whiny snowflakes"), but overall i just feel like people here are really snarky and mean spirited. I'm not pretending to be an exception here; sometimes i enjoy insulting, being insulted, and watching people say the hilarious degrading/sarcastic things that they do.

However, trying to police the forum based on what flaming/bullying is has its own problems. First of all, the majority of the insults here are indirect insults, generalizations about groups of people or a form of sarcastic mockery. I don't think either of these should disappear entirely, it's also really hard to talk about anarchism (which is basically a social philosophy) without fleshing out some of the disturbing opinions that we all have about each other. Also, thecollective already tries to police the forum based on how trollish and mean spirited the posts are, but in reality they erase around 50% of the worst instances of this and just let the rest of them stay up here, which is very confusing.

This is really the only forum i've used in my adult years with this level of hostility and spite. IMO most forums suffer from a problem of over-policing, so what could change about this forum that would veer it into having better discussions?

If people were not able to post as an anon name or a guest name, then what everyone says on here would have a history and a context like it does in real life. People would still troll but it wouldn't be as cute or mysterious anymore. And since everyone would be able to attach a style and personality to people, then every user would be a tiny bit more self-conscious of what they said.

The best part of this idea is that it would make it slightly harder to post on the forum in general. @101 and @news allow(ed) anon posts because it protects the identity of the people posting, but in the end it doesn't really do so any better than the internet naturally does in terms of not wanting the other people on the forum to know who you are. The ultra-security conscious could start a fake email address using fake names, which is NOT DIFFICULT AT ALL.

@101 is actually proof that allowing anon posts is in fact a huge security risk to the website. People just took advantage of this fact and spammed it like crazy, and now the forum is shut down. So: if the mods here simply required username, password, email to post, stopped removing crazy numbers of comments, and then removed usernames that are just spam accounts in disguise, removed spamming, i think this forum would be way better than it currently is.

I've actually tried to register usernames on this forum because i like the flavor that having a username gives, but the collective never sent the approval email, and my successfully verified "Nihilist" account got fucked up for some reason, i used a password to create the account that's very easy to remember and used on so many accounts i have yet it was claiming i had the wrong password. Something wierd is going on with the current system to have usernames.