On Tue, 2003-01-28 at 22:56, james duffy wrote: <"how to pick a politically correct user name" instructions snipped>
Any observations?
At the risk of being offensive, this is getting even more ridiculous.
My username makes reference to a Roman general. This might be offensive to people who think that I'm advocating militaristic imperialism, or that I'm critiquing the Roman empire.
Moreover, people have believed that my name is somehow vulgar ("a pun on dictator").
Should we ban everyone from using their real names, too? What if someone's first name is Dick? Or Jesus? Or Moses? If their last name is Johnson? Or Matsushitsa? Or Fokker?
Instead of trying to prescribe usernames, a much better solution would be some equivalent of ostracism. For example, allow people to choose on a case by case basis to see users by userid instead of username.
Thus instead of seeing entries by CrucifiedChrist you'd see entries by 5406 or whatever.
If some number of people do this, then (and only then) would we need to consider taking some more serious action (like an automatic warning requesting a change of username; if more people continue to "shun" that user, the username change might be automatic. however, i dislike this idea because it could lead to some ugly tyranny of the majority situations).
Just my two cents.
--tc