someone who posted with a nonexistent email address, including “anonymous@askwoody.com,” cannot subscribe to a forum topic and receive notifications about it.

Someone using a one-time random mail address cannot subscribe to a forum topic and receive notifications about it, either.

Looking forward to see the change in action.

Your site, your rules; I don’t post enough for it to matter.  However, I think what’s worse than anonymous posters are forum members who feel the burning need to insert themselves into nearly every thread because they think they are smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else.  That type of pseudo condescension is considerably more annoying than allowing anonymous postings.

And no, I am not talking about members who are actually helpful (PKCano, for example). The ones I am referring to feel the need to up their post count as if there is some kind of  Internet Academy award for doing so.

I doubt that this post will pass moderation muster but at least one person will read it. Take care and stay safe.

Good changes, Susan:

Can you add a feature that directs a Forum User to LOGIN first
if that User has attempted an anonymous post?

I recall a few times when I have replied withOUT doing a LOGIN first,
and that was ONLY because I found a particular article or reply
to be interesting enough to distract me from doing a LOGIN.

Put simply, I forgot to LOGIN.

A courteous reminder from your Forum software should solve that.

So much for “Ask Woody”. Value of a public site disappears.

To be fair, they explicitly said they weren’t talking about people like PKCano or the rest of the staff. (A mod is clearly part of the staff.) I don’t agree with their point, but I also am sad to see this feature go.

Forgetting to log in doesn’t make sense to me, since all you have to do is click that little checkbox the first time you log in. I intentionally avoid logging in so that my posts are judged by what I type and not people’s idea of who I am. I only signed up to pay for Pro, and used my normal email so I’d get the Plus Newsletter there. I don’t even consider myself someone who posts “on the forums,” as I nearly always just reply to the articles you guys write. I’d always seen these as more of a comments section than a community. Plus the fact that my posts had to be approved meant that I was sure someone on the staff had to read them.

It’s not a huge deal that I’ll have to set up a second account to be the one I post from. But it was nice to post anonymously, even if Google has started making ReCAPTCHA less useful to use, since it won’t let me just check a box anymore. I don’t get why Google stopped using my Google account to figure out I was human. I even have two-factor, so they know I’ve not been hacked.

I just push back against the idea that anonymity is a bad thing for the Internet.

anonymous wrote:

I just push back against the idea that anonymity is a bad thing for the Internet.

You are not alone: for instance the EFF and Bitsoffreedom organisations are fighting for years, comparable the same as encryption to protect civilians.

Read some at EFF

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/11/eff-tells-court-protect-anonymous-speakers-apply-proper-test-unmasking-them

I can share a (now) funny experience which I had
at a popular PC hardware website, many years ago.

In one of their User Forum topics, I had simply
posted a straightforward and honest question:

“Is ‘VISTA’ an acronym for Virtual Instant Surveillance Tactical Application?”

The moderators IMMEDIATELY banned me FOR LIFE.

So, I re-registered using a pen name and
eventually was awarded BEST SOLUTION 33 times!

(I archived those 33 BEST SOLUTIONS at our website,
if anyone is interested: FYI lots of those SOLUTIONS
are now obsolete, however e.g. optimizing spinning HDD.)

Why is this a plus article?

Not that this impacts me at all, but if the idea is to allow you to distinguish between anonymous posters, then surely a name is enough to do that? Why do you require an email address? You mentioned that you don’t mind people entering a bogus email address, so why not make this field optional (and make clear that it is optional)?

I’ve never really understood the argument for posting anonymously, given that those of us who post openly do so under user names that don’t identify us to readers or other posters, and doubtless a number of anonymous posters donate to the site and do so openly to those running it. I fully get that e.g a senior exec at Microsoft might not want the company to know that he’s posting here, but everyone has so many “anonymous” email addresses that maintaining his/her confidentiality would hardly be difficult – or, at least one would hope so for a senior exec at Microsoft!

As an ordinary poster I do find that a topic with several anonymous posters contributing to it  means it can be difficult following the discussion because it’s impossible to know which anonymous poster is following up earlier comments, and which one you’re replying to as a result.

Would be really nice if next to that name and email there would be the login box. Just like now, I had to scroll back up and down. Yes, I am lazy!

Susan Bradley wrote:

Currently this site is unlike any other site and in it’s current form it encourages even registered users to not log in. There are many a time that someone apologizes as they forgot to log in.

In this regard, it would be helpful to have the login cookie last for longer than it currently does. I’ve lost count of the number of times here that somebody’s reported having posted anonymously because they didn’t realize they had been logged out (through no action of their own). This adds to the “anonymous 1 or anonymous 2?” confusion, and itself creates more work for the moderators when the poster asks to have their post properly attributed.

I have a somewhat complex password for this site that I can’t easily remember, and having to log back in anew every so often becomes a bump in the road.

Suggestion: make the login cookie last longer!

BobT wrote:

Why is this a plus article?

It isn’t. If you look at the green box at the bottom of newsletter posts, it has links to the newsletters the article is in. In this case, both. And the full note went out in the free newsletter to be sure no one missed it.

Good or bad and certainly not to upset anyone, I have to ask this question:

How many websites do you know of that offer all the help and nice features that AskWoody does, and don’t require you to log in?  I personally have never found any.

Charlie wrote:

How many websites do you know of that offer all the help and nice features that AskWoody does, and don’t require you to log in?

A perceptive point.

A great team here, no doubt! Yet some of the most amazing help has been by ‘anonymous’ question or reply posters. Often I have seen signed in members pertinent & clear questions go unanswered or written off. Sometimes there are glitches with your new system/platform that seems to fall on one person (Susan) to sort out with your new vendors/format. Not great when dealing with an issue that requires a timely response. It’s been a fab site, but it seems to have become so proprietary, and with many bugs…I just wonder what wise voices we will be losing. And privacy is a right. It will be interesting to see how few (or hopefully greater) help replies there will be on any topic, pedestrian or intricate.

Cybertooth wrote:

I’ve lost count of the number of times here that somebody’s reported having posted anonymously because they didn’t realize they had been logged out

How can someone not realized that he/she are not logged on ?
On the every page at the top right you either have / don’t have log-in field.

PKCano wrote:

Definitely NOT easy to forget because if you are not logged in you have to deal with the Captcha that is NEVER there when logged in.

Ah, but it’s precisely at that point that the user experience is most impacted by the login cookie’s having timed out.

The gist of the issue isn’t knowing that you are or are not logged in–it’s getting signed out frequently such that you keep having to log back in to be able to participate fully. Realizing that you’re no longer signed in is a consequence of this circumstance.

Perhaps a separate “instruction sheet” is needed to explain:

• login
• create a post from a word processor or text file
• post the contents to forum edit box
• add an attachment
• use the edit tabs across the edit box (hieroglyphs)
• swap between Visual and Text
• what HTML looks like (and how to remove detritus)
• edit a post after it has been posted — time duration of edit (looks like at least one hour now)
• include links
• logout

To me being in this site as “Anonymous” without realizing it has happened a few times, even recently, when coming to see a comment on some new horrifying cybercrime I got an email with the link to the comment on this, because I subscribe to “Red Hot.”

I click on the link, then here I am, directly into the comment, then I have a question, because the posting is too telegraphic … then I write my question. Then, not realizing in the heat of the moment that I have not yet logged in,  I hit “Submit.”

Then unexpected things happen.

There is no sage advice nor cure for this incurable condition.

Well it was fun and amazing to find AskWoody that would let us post without an account. At least one time it was a requirement to be one of anonymous here because possible repercussions were not known, thank you for the assistance.

Woody if you are still reading occasionally, thank you for and many others for getting this started and keeping it going also to Susan for taking the lead after his retirement.

Thank you to those who were inclined to reply and thanks for the thanks, I hope the help was helpful.

Yes, I do regret a few replies while being under the Anonymous banner…

Anonymity on the internet itself may not be bad, it is the mindset to abuse this resource. The staff has probably seen things/topics which are truly terrible! So I understand the change even it won’t be the same, also manually re-configuring a site after software updates is not fun! So goodnight and thanks.

bbearren wrote:

That is a matter of personal preference. I log out every time I leave the site.

I never log out on my own. In fact, I typically leave several AW threads open in different tabs, and then refresh them every few hours to see what’s been posted since the last time.

The short cookie expiration date has actually resulted, more than once, in situations where I was still logged in when I started to write a post, and then by the time I clicked on Submit I had been logged out and the new post showed up with me as “anonymous”.

I guess that within two weeks, I will find out how the new system works. Would be nice if one didn’t have to find out, and could simply stay logged on until one specifically chose to log out.

So: how about a troll that choses to take the same temporary name as another anonymous and then hijacks a discussion?

Anonymous56 wrote:

some Askwoody MVPs have cleaned up their condescending and belittling attitudes

I’ve not seen these attitudes from MVPs. Maybe you are misinterpreting some replies?

cheers, Paul

Paul T wrote:

Anonymous56 wrote:

some Askwoody MVPs have cleaned up their condescending and belittling attitudes

I’ve not seen these attitudes from MVPs. Maybe you are misinterpreting some replies?

cheers, Paul

a stand-up comedian is enlightning the vocabulary  😉

There are many new people who visit this site now.  Those of us old timers remember the “Windows Secrets Lounge” which was a great site too.  The Windows Secrets Lounge was saved by Woody and his crew at that time when WSL was about to go belly up.  Woody incorporated WSL and the WS newsletter into this site which took a lot of time and effort.

So much for the history lesson.  The Windows Secrets Lounge was stricter and did not tolerate the breaking of its rules.  If you broke a rule too often you got banned from using the site for a certain amount of time.  Usually it was a few weeks, months, or even for good!

I just thought I’d pass this bit of info. along.

Bring back Woody. He needs to come back from retirement. He understood why people need to post Annon. I did not see this post until I finally got Internet back. Government shut internet down for 2 weeks. Woody would have understood that since he came from another country. Susan is from USA and has not experience the what it means. It seems this site is gone….Bye Woody and his great site and thanks.

askwoody site has end on 6/8/2022…..