Pay your own 5 dollars

February 2, 2010 4:46 AM

Account sharing is ok?
posted by asockpuppet to Etiquette/Policy at 4:46 AM (119 comments total)

Eponetc.
posted by DU at 4:57 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Accounts yes, needles no!
posted by turgid dahlia at 4:58 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also desserts!
posted by turgid dahlia at 4:58 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Never fails to amaze me that people won't just pony up the $5. I lurked for a year or two before joining, but you wouldn't have seen me testing the waters by sharing someones account. Well, other than when meatbomb let me try out being an astral mod (I didn't like it).
posted by cjorgensen at 4:59 AM on February 2, 2010

Sounds like a fun idea. The mods should comandeer this dormant account, and add an "Ask as Luther Blissett" checkbox to AskMe.
posted by Dr Dracator at 5:02 AM on February 2, 2010 [4 favorites]

Who cares? It's kinda weak, but do you want to try enforcing a no-sharing rule? On the other hand, if you want to judge them, go right ahead. Have fun!
posted by molecicco at 5:03 AM on February 2, 2010

My guess: it's probably fine as long as it's not used to get around posting limits.

My opinion: it's really annoying in cases like this, and I tend not to believe that it's really two people.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:15 AM on February 2, 2010

Cortex says not really okay.
posted by b33j at 5:21 AM on February 2, 2010

Account sharing is not ok!
posted by The Deej at 5:32 AM on February 2, 2010

Yes it is!!!
posted by The Deej at 5:33 AM on February 2, 2010

ABSOLUTELY NOT OK!
posted by The Deej at 5:33 AM on February 2, 2010

I see nothing wrong with it.
posted by The Deej at 5:33 AM on February 2, 2010

MOTHER!!!!!!!
posted by The Deej at 5:33 AM on February 2, 2010 [17 favorites]

The drama in that issue is not from my life, so I do not want anyone's advice to be judged by the existing drama from this post and the drama from that...which would make anyone look worthy of being dumped for being drama-ridden.

Even the poster herself thinks account-sharing has downsides! Well, one of them does.
posted by rtha at 5:34 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm waiting for dortmuder to say, that sly fox.
posted by BeerFilter at 5:35 AM on February 2, 2010

Looking through my posting history, any of my off colour/inappropriate/questionable/non-favourited comments were written by my past/present/future girlfriend.
posted by gman at 5:38 AM on February 2, 2010 [7 favorites]

Not everyone is a rich American that can afford their own account to sprawl inefficiently around in. Besides, account-sharing reduces carbon emissions. Also, instead of water-wasting grass I grow vegetables in my profile.
posted by DU at 5:39 AM on February 2, 2010 [24 favorites]

I'm wondering now whether the mother-in-law problem was hers or the other "person" cos penguingrl-people seem to have lots of (how did turgid dahlia put it?) Dawson's Creek in their lives.
posted by b33j at 5:40 AM on February 2, 2010

When I rent out my identity to the less fortunate, it includes no more than three MeFi comments from my account.
posted by Shohn at 5:41 AM on February 2, 2010

We're all sharing the same account.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:42 AM on February 2, 2010 [6 favorites]

Sharing digital resources of any sort where not explicitly permitted in the applicable License Agreement or Terms of Service should be strictly prohibited.

I'm sure all right-thinking Mefites are with us on this.
posted by a young man in spats at 5:44 AM on February 2, 2010

How is this different than the questions that begin with, "Asking for a friend..."?
posted by Houstonian at 5:53 AM on February 2, 2010

Because "Asking for a friend" is explicit, while casual account-sharing isn't? It also gives AskMe trolls and excuse when their drama-rama posts are inconsistent. Not that I think that was going on in this case.
posted by muddgirl at 5:58 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also desserts!

Desserts yes, or desserts no?
posted by owtytrof at 6:11 AM on February 2, 2010

Desserts, just.
posted by DU at 6:16 AM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

Gourd, I hate the "asking for a friend" question. If your friend wants to ask a question, give 'em $5 and direct them to the sign-up page. If you're not going to give the gift of MetaFilter membership, what kind of friend are you?

(I'll admit, I've asked a question [maybe two?] for my mom, but it's because she just barely learned how to use FaceBook. The interwebs is not her milieu.)
posted by grapefruitmoon at 6:19 AM on February 2, 2010

You let your mom use Facebook? What kind of a daughter are you?
posted by gman at 6:21 AM on February 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

Is asking for a friend okay? I'm asking for a friend.
posted by Eideteker at 6:29 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Is responding for a friend ok?
posted by daniel_charms at 6:38 AM on February 2, 2010

Or responding for a question with a question for a friend.
posted by daniel_charms at 6:40 AM on February 2, 2010

I wondered why everyone had flagged that comment.

No generally speaking account sharing is not okay. That said, we know there are a few people who have a family account and we have dropped them a note about it but otherwise it's not a big "you are in trouble" sort of thing. I'll drop that OP a note too. Generally we try to gently enforce the one-account-one-person rule which means

- no account sharing
- if you have a sock puppet you use it sparingly and not to get around posting limits
- having two identities on the site where one is not clearly the main account and the other[s] clearly the "for jokes" account [or the "for privacy" account] is not okay
- serial account opening/closing is not really that great [we've seen this pretty rarely but it's always weird]
- responding to your own AnonyMe as if you were not the OP is not okay
- if you are a serial account opener/closer and someone figures it out, denying it is not okay [though we would otherwise not tell]

Anything I'm missing?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:45 AM on February 2, 2010 [4 favorites]

You let your mom use Facebook? What kind of a daughter are you?

A bad one, obviously.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 6:46 AM on February 2, 2010

Rightly or wrongly, some people haven't identified with their account and are not really aware of the communal aspects of doing so. In their mind, their forum account is on the same level as the cable TV account or something. It's just something you use to access content, not something that is a means of interactivity with others.
posted by Burhanistan at 6:52 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

responding to your own AnonyMe as if you were not the OP is not okay

"It is NOT a ridiculous question! The answer is NOT implicit! Give the OP a break!"
posted by bingo at 6:53 AM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

We are legion, for we are many

/creepiest part of the bible
posted by shakespeherian at 6:57 AM on February 2, 2010

What jessamyn said. This isn't really a someone-is-in-trouble situation in this case, but we'll drop that user a line to be clear about that needing to be one person's account and if they have any ongoing need to accommodate a two different people it's time to pick up a second account.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:01 AM on February 2, 2010

- responding to your own AnonyMe as if you were not the OP is not okay

What about responding to it AS the OP? Like, if you were expecting a lot of, uh, guff and you didn't get it, is it bad form to say, "Thanks guys, that was actually me, whew, I feel way better!"? No one knows if it was really your question, so I can see that being problematic. I don't foresee ever doing this, but I have been curious.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 7:10 AM on February 2, 2010

If an anonymous asker wants to out themselves in a question, that's their prerogative and they're never gonna get in trouble for doing so.

If anyone ever pretends to be the asker outing themselves, they are getting banned.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:13 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

If we see people replying to AnonyMe questions, especially really touchy ones, we'll do a reality check to see if it's actually their question [hard to explain, but it's simple for us to see a list of, say, who has asked an anonyme question in the past week, though much harder to link them to a specific question] and if it's plausible, we'll leave the comment alone.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:13 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

- having two identities on the site where one is not clearly the main account and the other[s] clearly the "for jokes" account [or the "for privacy" account] is not okay

Really? It seems like there's quite a lot of that. (the "for jokes" part at least; I wouldn't know about the "for privacy"). How is that different from a sock puppet?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:21 AM on February 2, 2010

Horace Rumpole: Note the "not." (It threw me at first too.)

- having two identities on the site where one is not clearly the main account and the other[s] clearly the "for jokes" account [or the "for privacy" account] is not okay
posted by The Deej at 7:25 AM on February 2, 2010

I think she's saying that having a main account and a joke/privacy account is OK. When there is not that division of labor, it is not OK.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 7:25 AM on February 2, 2010

It's fine to have a jokey account and/or an account for just asking/replying to sensitive questions. But running two identities as if there were two separate people is what we'd like to avoid. If we see people doing this [especially replying to their own questions] we'll tell them to knock it off. This may just be a terminology thing. I see a sock puppet as an account that is sort of set up to be another legit-looking account but in a sort of deceptive way. I guess I get my idea of the definition from Wikipedia.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:26 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

Someone alert the Cabal!
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 7:28 AM on February 2, 2010

Ah, tripped up by the double negative, thanks.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:32 AM on February 2, 2010

Certainly it's sometimes not possible to be not tripped up by a double negative.
posted by The Deej at 7:45 AM on February 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

Ah, tripped up by the double negative

They're never not slippery.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:46 AM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

Several people use my account. They all share this same body, but each has a distinct point of view and opinion on what was the best Bond movie.

If you're confused, you can always tell which is which by our unique accents.

(Sometimes I let my cat post under my name as well, but when that happens it's really obvious; everything is properly punctuated and spelled correctly, and has a distinctly mouse-centric focus to the writing.)
posted by quin at 7:49 AM on February 2, 2010 [3 favorites]

"- having two identities on the site where one is not clearly the main account and the other[s] clearly the "for jokes" account [or the "for privacy" account] is not okay"

The Dhoyt Rule.
posted by klangklangston at 8:09 AM on February 2, 2010

Just leave pot and kettle alone. They are my heroes.
posted by languagehat at 8:16 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'd love to know about examples of people replying with a sock puppet in their own AskMes - or replying to their anonymous questions the same way. I realize the mods aren't gonna tell me. They'd better not, that would be un-modly. But stil.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 8:24 AM on February 2, 2010

I'd love to know about examples...

I've seen it maybe... 3-4 times ever? But often it's a case of the question going not that great and the OP showing up to be all "Hey I sort of see where the OP is coming from..." It's really touchy because if we delete the comment after people see it, they'll be like "Why did you delete that?" but if we leave it, I totally dont feel okay with that. I always write people a note explaining things. The same thing is true for people who ask a non-anon question less than a week after they ask an anon question. Breaks the rules, but deleting it draws attention to the anon question which is also not okay so we have to be sort of careful.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:27 AM on February 2, 2010

I'm just disappointed that our community usually follows the rules and our mods are so conscientious.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 8:48 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

- serial account opening/closing is not really that great [we've seen this pretty rarely but it's always weird]

Does this mean closing and opening new accounts repeatedly or does it refer to all cases where someone closes an account and creates a new one?
posted by 6550 at 9:07 AM on February 2, 2010

I think I have a sock puppet from about 2002, and I've forgotten the name AND anything else about it. It's probably a Zippity Something. Oh, and there is no cabal.
posted by norm at 9:11 AM on February 2, 2010

Repeatedly. It's fine for someone to decide to move on to a new account, that's certainly happened a number of times in the past for various reasons.

Where it becomes an issue is if someone does it like six times in a row. We see that very rarely, but it happens.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:13 AM on February 2, 2010

I'm confused... it wasn't that long ago there was a MeTa about the difficulty of mods identifying anonymous posters. As I recall, it's not impossible, but it is intentionally cumbersome. So they can't just run a query and get a nice list of dastardly acts of anonymity; but if they suspect a particular instance is crooked they can track it down manually.

However, it sounds here as if the mods (or, at least, jessamyn) are fairly aware of this stuff as soon as it hits the site and can offer a count of how often it happens. No confrontation intended, I'm just curious how much is immediately on display to the mods, how much requires some sleuthing, and how often they do that sleuthing (and whether it's always warranted or sometimes just for fun).
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 9:20 AM on February 2, 2010

However, it sounds here as if the mods (or, at least, jessamyn) are fairly aware of this stuff as soon as it hits the site and can offer a count of how often it happens.

The event of an anonymous poster outing themself is unusual and notable enough that we tend to hear about it, either from folks worried that the poster might have done so without thinking or in rare sketchier cases from folks worried that something smells.

One of the things the anonymous system does is fire off an email to Matt and Jess, I think, saying something like "hey an anonymous question just got submitted from userid xxxx". When it comes down to trying to figure out who posted what, they can go take a look through those otherwise-ignored email records to do some cross-referencing and figure out who asked what.

So nothing immediately on display; the database itself (and hence our admin interface) doesn't know who asked what and there's no built-in tool for skimming or whatever.

We don't do much sleuthing, really only when there's specifically some sort of red flag in what we're reading or what other folks are letting us know about, and there's not a lot of novelty in it so we don't really have any motivation for doing it "just for fun".
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:30 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

So to give you a specific [made up] example. We get an email that says

"new anonymous question from user cortex, approve it here" with no other info about the question. I don't know about the other mods, but that email goes directly into a folder and I never look at it unless I have a concern.

"here" is a link that goes to the anonyme queue which usually has 2-3 questions in the hopper. Often if we know the user we can possibly figure out which question is theirs.

So in the "Help me find good banjo love songs" anonyme that I've approved, if cortex shows up saying "You guys are being jerks to the OP, the banjo is a really great instrument!!" I might say "hmmmmm" and go looking to see if there's a liklihood that the question was, in fact, asked by cortex. If it was, I'd delete his answer and send him an email saying that was not at all kosher.

My guess is there are a lot of times that people do this where we don't know at all that they're doing it. But when we do catch it, it's sort of glaring.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:01 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'm not sure I understand:

We get an email that says "new anonymous question from user cortex, approve it here" with no other info about the question.

I thought I remembered reading (several times) that you guys had to go digging to figure out who asked an anonymous question. "Usually two or three questions in the hopper" doesn't sound like you really have to dig all that much at all, and at the worst you know it was by one of only two or three specific people.

And are there times when you get an email saying "new anonymous question from user so-and-so", and there is only one question in the queue? That would be even worse, obviously.

I don't mean to complain, but this genuinely makes me feel slightly more uncomfortable about asking anonymous questions, especially in light of the fact that, as I said, I seem to remember reading several assurances from you that yes, you could figure out who asked an anonymous question, and yes, you do it occasionally when warranted, but in general it takes digging to figure it out.

I didn't ever imagine that "it takes digging to figure it out" meant "we know for sure, without even trying to figure it out, that it is one of two specific people, but we would have to try to figure out which of those two specific people it is."
posted by Flunkie at 10:30 AM on February 2, 2010

Do they allow account sharing in the military?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 10:33 AM on February 2, 2010

"new anonymous question from user so-and-so"

They said "userid XXXX," so it's a number. Unless the number is "1," it's not gonna be immediately obvious who asked it.
posted by explosion at 10:34 AM on February 2, 2010

A while ago, I asked an anonymous question about how someone could get service x in location y. I didn't get any good answers (turns out, no Mefites are that familiar with location y's x options!). However, about two weeks later I was lucky enough to find out the information I wanted, myself. I considered that this, if anything, would be a situation in which it would be reasonable for an anonymous asker to respond to their own question, so that the information would be available to anyone searching AskMe's archives for that same information. But I figured it still felt icky enough that I shouldn't.
posted by Ms. Saint at 10:36 AM on February 2, 2010

at the worst you know it was by one of only two or three specific people.

And are there times when you get an email saying "new anonymous question from user so-and-so", and there is only one question in the queue? That would be even worse, obviously.

That sometimes happens. I just let the email go right to a big folder, so I'm never checking it as it comes in. This is a case where you sort of have to trust us basically not wanting to know. That said, your anonymous questions are not wholly anonymous from the mods and people will have to use their own judgment about whether that's okay with you or not. We don't tell anyone who has asked anonymous questions. We don't even tell whether someone has or has not asked an anonymous question. We'll sometimes talk on Team Mod about a troublesome question [pretty much only suicide questions iirc] and that's about the extent of it. We take your privacy seriously, but at the end of the day we can figure out who asked what question. If that's not enough anonymity for you, then the AnonyMe feature is not for you.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:42 AM on February 2, 2010

There's a difference between "at the end of the day we can figure out who asked what question", which was already known information, and "we know without trying that you asked a question, and we know that it was one of these two", which is (to me) new information.

This is true despite the fact that I'm more or less comfortable with knowing that "at the end of the day we can figure out who asked what question".
posted by Flunkie at 10:51 AM on February 2, 2010

I thought I remembered reading (several times) that you guys had to go digging to figure out who asked an anonymous question. "Usually two or three questions in the hopper" doesn't sound like you really have to dig all that much at all, and at the worst you know it was by one of only two or three specific people.

Well, the emails are there for a record, not for a prompt; Jess keeps up with the anony queue daily by default, I poke in occasionally as well or if she's away and Matt does too I think. The emails, again, go in a folder but don't really get any eyeballs on them until such time as we specifically have a reason to look, at which point knowing who asked was is specifically the point and the anonymity thing (as far as us mods are concerned) has become moot.

It's rare that there's a situation where we're looking at an email saying "x submitted a question" and also looking at the anony queue at the same time, and when we are it's because we're looking for a reason, basically.

I didn't ever imagine that "it takes digging to figure it out" meant "we know for sure, without even trying to figure it out, that it is one of two specific people, but we would have to try to figure out which of those two specific people it is."

Matt and Jess don't sit and stare at those emails and then pop over to the queue to check out who is posting. It does take an active effort to figure out who posted what; it doesn't happen without trying, and we don't try without a specific good reason and thankfully that's not too often.

The system exists as it does at this point to provide a certain amount of extra buffer of anonymity for the public-facing side of the anonymous-question function; not only are questions anonymous to the world, they're also anonymous to the db which means there's a bit more security on that front even if the db was somehow compromised. (If the db AND Matt's email were compromised at the same time by the same person who wanted to put anonymous submissions to names, that'd be a problem for anonymity but it'd be a problem for a giant catastrophic pile of other things too.)

Fundamentally, folks posting questions anonymously are anonymous to the public but not strictly anonymous to us. The vast majority of those questions will, in fact, remain anonymous to us because we don't want to be in people's business and we have it set up in such a way that it'd be hard for us to accidentally figure out who asked what, but at the end of the day it is necessary for us to be able to verify someone's identity if we need to and that's not ever going to change.

They said "userid XXXX," so it's a number. Unless the number is "1," it's not gonna be immediately obvious who asked it.

Well, I said it and I don't get the emails so I'm just guessing userid as an example. Sounds like it may be username, but it's a distinction without a difference for the most part since (a) the database doesn't know who asked what and (b) Matt and Jess don't sit around reading the "x posted a question" emails for pleasure.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:53 AM on February 2, 2010

The emails, again, go in a folder but don't really get any eyeballs on them until such time as we specifically have a reason to look

I don't mean to belabor this, and I'll likely shut up about it after this post unless I'm asked a direct question or something, but:

That's you, and that's Jessamyn. And I don't doubt that it's the others, too -- I'm not trying to impugn them, I'm only saying that only you and Jessamyn have explicitly said this, and it's not an absolute. Maybe some mod, now or future, doesn't like email folders, they just like everything in one big inbox.

Even in her first post about this, Jessamyn said that she did it this way, but that she doesn't know if the other mods do the same.

And even in the case of you or Jessamyn (or anyone else who explicitly says they do it this way), we're relying on, for example, the hope that you never change your email client to be one, such as the one I use, that shows a temporary little window in your system tray saying that a new message has arrived, and its sender and its subject.

Or maybe, like me, some mod's email is automatically placed into folders when it arrives at their main computer, but they occasionally check their email from other computers via their ISP's web interface, wherein it's just one big unsorted list of messages.

I'm not saying you shouldn't have the ability to look this information up, and obviously that means that we're trusting you to only do so when warranted, and I'd like to reiterate that I'm comfortable with that fact. But in the current situation, the information is essentially being presented to you. This is fundamentally different than how I remember it being described in the past. There's got to be a better way to do this.

At the very least, I think that perhaps you should be more clear about this when you give such assurances in the future.
posted by Flunkie at 11:11 AM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

There's got to be a better way to do this.

I trust'em.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:20 AM on February 2, 2010

We may have to agree to disagree at this point. The system has not changed since we started the email-the-mods function which has been in place for years. While we explicitly protect the fact of which questions were asked by which people, we do not explicitly protect the fact that a specific user may have asked an anonymous question generally. Rather, that information is as protected as the rest of my personal email. If we add mods in the future, they may or may not even get access to the anonymous queue [right now, for example, vacapinta doesn't have access to that queue. I think mathowie and pb do but since they also have root access to the database (unlike cortex and I) this is sort of academic].

I appreciate that this news may be unsettling to some people, but this is why we try to be crystal clear just how anonymous your question is: anonymous to MeFi generally, not anonymous to the mods, though there is not an obvious question-asker link unless we look for it.

The text of the question, any text, is not in the email we receive. There is not even a link to a specific question, just a link to a page where all the questions are. If you are uncomfortable with the fact that there is evidence in my email that you have asked an anonymous question, please do not use the AnonyMe feature.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:21 AM on February 2, 2010

The lure of knowing private information is only tantalizing for about five minutes, and then life intrudes. I have the ability to cross reference a lot of private information in my job. This was exciting for roughly 10 minutes until I realized exactly how much work I had. After that, the poking around just became horrifyingly mundane and too much of a time suck to even think about. Sure, the information is all there for me to put together if I have any interest in doing so, but it takes time and I have so many other interesting things to be doing besides that. Given the shear volume of posts/comments/answers on this site, I would find it nigh on unbelievable if any of the mods said they had any interest in figuring out who posted most AnonyMes (obviously excepting suicide sorts).

People's secrets are surprisingly mundane. Once you've read enough of them, it's just not interesting to try and link them up with specific people. The mods are well past this point, and I trust that if another mod is ever needed they will hire someone discreet who's not going to be interested in linking these things up.
posted by stoneweaver at 11:29 AM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

I feel largely responsible for this derail... please accept my apologies. Thanks to the mods for their patience in helping us flog this dead horse again. :-)
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 11:31 AM on February 2, 2010

I trust'em.

I didn't say I didn't. In fact, I said I did. Multiple times.

But that is a different issue than whether they should be essentially presented with the information or not, and it's a very different issue than whether they should say that they need to dig for the information if, in fact, it is essentially being presented to them.

I appreciate that this news may be unsettling to some people, but this is why we try to be crystal clear just how anonymous your question is

A major portion of my point is that you have not been crystal clear on this (I'm not disputing that you have tried to be crystal clear).

Yes, you've been crystal clear that questions are not anonymous to mods, but in many of your descriptions of this in the past, as I remember them, you've stressed that you have to go digging for the information. While that's strictly true in your case, and cortex's case, and probably in the other mods' cases, in that you have to "dig" by opening up an email folder, it is not "crystal clear" what you mean by "dig".

For example, it gives us no indication of the fact that any mod with an email client that shows new message notifications knows who asked what question by default, or at the very least what three people asked what three questions. This is not remotely similar to what I imagined "dig" meant, and so, again, it is not "crystal clear". Again, I think that perhaps you should try to be more clear about this in the future, at the very least.

Now I will shut up.
posted by Flunkie at 11:35 AM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

But that is a different issue than whether they should be essentially presented with the information or not, and it's a very different issue than whether they should say that they need to dig for the information if, in fact, it is essentially being presented to them.

Flunkie, I don't know how much clearer we can be about the fact that, in practice, we are not being "presented with" this information in any meaningful sense. I hear you that you are uncomfortable with the idea of us or some hypothetical future version or cohort of us watching this stuff come across the wire, but it's not happening and we don't have any interest in it happening.

While that's strictly true in your case, and cortex's case, and probably in the other mods' cases, in that you have to "dig" by opening up an email folder, it is not "crystal clear" what you mean by "dig".

We've tried to be fairly clear that it's not a push-button process, that it's not automatic, that it doesn't live in the database, and that most important of all we can't do it accidentally. The details of how we go about not looking at this stuff are really pretty much down to our personal computing habits; the key thing is that in practice we don't go looking casually, and we do in fact have to make an effort to look.

There may be no way to bridge this gap between what we think is a practical and sufficiently responsible way to deal with this stuff (or, rather, again, mostly not deal with it) on a daily basis and what you'd prefer to happen, and I can respect your discomfort on that front, but practically speaking it is a tiny sideline issue and something that you're pretty much going to have to trust us to deal with with due care.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:47 AM on February 2, 2010

I didn't say I didn't. In fact, I said I did. Multiple times.

Just messin' with ya, i don't really trust them either.

While that's strictly true in your case, and cortex's case, and probably in the other mods' cases, in that you have to "dig" by opening up an email folder, it is not "crystal clear" what you mean by "dig".

I think the take away is that they could get the information if they wanted to, but they're not really interested, so if they do want they it have to "dig" for it in the sense they'd rather be doing something else.

You guys aren't gonna tell us who asked the Taters question, are you?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:20 PM on February 2, 2010

Maybe we can figure out the taters question by process of elimination, if we simply get every other metafilter member to post in this thread that s/he didn't ask it.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 12:32 PM on February 2, 2010

But... but they DO have to dig, don't they?

Imagine getting the same 10 or 12 pieces of spam every day, and diverting them to a folder, and then finding out that there's a website that will give you an award if you have a PARTICULAR spam email, but the only information they'll give you is the 12-24 hr period in which the spam was originally written.

Now instead of an award, imagine that you'll actually get a giant kick to the nuts. Which is how I imagine it feels when a moderator has to deal with some crap that is serious enough to require such work.
posted by muddgirl at 12:45 PM on February 2, 2010 [4 favorites]

Won't someone think of Jessamyn's tender nuts?!?!

I'd rather not.
posted by Skot at 12:52 PM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

I always try to pretend that "nuts" is really a slang word for gonads. I imaging that getting kicked in the ovaries would be pretty painful, if it were physically possible.
posted by muddgirl at 12:54 PM on February 2, 2010

Metafilter: a problem for a giant catastrophic pile of other things too.
posted by Mitheral at 1:00 PM on February 2, 2010

What's "the taters question"?
posted by Flunkie at 1:38 PM on February 2, 2010

What's "the taters question"?

You know... Taters? Po ta toes? Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew?
posted by Greg Nog at 1:58 PM on February 2, 2010 [4 favorites]

I imagine Jessamyn is digging for taters.
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 2:02 PM on February 2, 2010

I considered that this, if anything, would be a situation in which it would be reasonable for an anonymous asker to respond to their own question, so that the information would be available to anyone searching AskMe's archives for that same information. But I figured it still felt icky enough that I shouldn't.

There's always the option of emailing the mods and having them put in an update. One of those "from the original poster" comments. The downsides are that you're outing youself to the mods and also causing them a small amount of work, so you'd only want to do it if the update was worth while. But assuming the update isn't frivolous they always seem cheerful enough about posting them.
posted by shelleycat at 2:40 PM on February 2, 2010

I'm going to go ahead and close this now.
posted by fixedgear at 2:40 PM on February 2, 2010

I actually do not know who asked the taters question. I specifically didn't go check.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:40 PM on February 2, 2010

You posted a followup from the OP.
posted by Flunkie at 3:41 PM on February 2, 2010

And I deleted the email from them and I have no recollection of who it was from. If people email us follow-ups we generally take it on good faith that they're who they say they are and the question is theirs. A lot of people email from random [e-mail] addresses.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:46 PM on February 2, 2010

Ah, that's good.
posted by Flunkie at 3:53 PM on February 2, 2010

I'm pretty sure I already explained what taters are.
posted by shakespeherian at 4:00 PM on February 2, 2010

YOU LIE
posted by klangklangston at 5:04 PM on February 2, 2010

I actually do not know who asked the taters question. I specifically didn't go check.

*lights tater signal*

Come'on OP, drop us a line, tell us the deal.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:55 PM on February 2, 2010

You serve them with plo chops.
posted by mendel at 6:49 PM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

I have posted an anonymous AskMe (no, not that one, and not that one either). If I'd known then what I know now about anonymous AskMes, I probably wouldn't've posted it.

I haven't looked at the 'Post an anonymous question' in years, but I think it would be good if it included some text explaining what 'anonymous' means in an AskMe context.
posted by box at 6:53 PM on February 2, 2010

It would be easy enough to add that to a faq entry and then link that on the anonyme page... let me look into how we'd do that.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:55 PM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

For now I've added this to the anonyme posting page: "Your question will be anonymous to MetaFilter readers but mods can determine who has asked a question." while we talk about whether a more clear faq explanation is needed.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:59 PM on February 2, 2010 [1 favorite]

At first I was a little surprised by Jessamyn's explanation, but you know what? I don't care. You have to trust the mods, implicitly, inasmuch as they could be lying all along about how AskMe works - there could be an admin page with a little box to accumulate jokes about how screwed up we are all, and a "send this to the FBI" button. They tell us there isn't.

I don't regret asking any anonymous askmes I may have asked (yes, that one).
posted by These Premises Are Alarmed at 6:59 PM on February 2, 2010 [2 favorites]

there could be an admin page with a little box to accumulate jokes about how screwed up we are all

Right now I bet they're totally giggling to each other about the fake question about taters and how it's driving us all crazy.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:02 PM on February 2, 2010

Anyone who reads AskMe regularly should know that the mods act as go-betweens for anonymous users. They post anonymous followup comments and occasionally talk about emailing the original poster for clarifications. It should be obvious from these actions that the mods can easily link anonymous questions back to the actual user. Did you think they had some double-blind automated anonymizer in the back-end? If so, you severely overestimate the sophistication of this thing we call Metafilter.
posted by ryanrs at 7:21 PM on February 2, 2010

a little box to accumulate jokes about how screwed up we are all

There's a greasemonkey script for that, you know.
posted by ryanrs at 7:22 PM on February 2, 2010

Anyone who reads AskMe regularly should know that the mods act as go-betweens for anonymous users. They post anonymous followup comments and occasionally talk about emailing the original poster for clarifications. It should be obvious from these actions that the mods can easily link anonymous questions back to the actual user. Did you think they had some double-blind automated anonymizer in the back-end? If so, you severely overestimate the sophistication of this thing we call Metafilter.

It's a little frustrating to me that my concerns are being interpreted, by some, in this way.

Was I not clear that I understand that the mods can figure out who asked what? Was I not clear that I understood it even before this latest revelation? Was I not clear that I was, and am, OK with this? I tried to be clear about all of these things, several times.

Incidentally, Jessamyn has indicated upthread that they don't actually check that supposed followups from the OP actually came from the OP, at least not in all cases, so while I agree that what you're saying is clear is actually clear, I don't think you're correct about why it is clear.
posted by Flunkie at 8:15 PM on February 2, 2010

ryanrs, I really didn't have any clue that there were emails or notifications that specifically said "User X asked an anonymous question that needs to be approved." I thought it was more like, "Here is an anonymous question that needs to be approved," and if the mods needed to track down who asked it there was some behinds the scenes way to see which users had accessed the Anonymous feature within a certain time frame and they could narrow it down from there. From previous explanations I've seen, the way to find out who asked a specific question seemed a lot more oblique.

And of course we all knew that the mods we intercessors on behalf of the questioners on occasion, but I figure most people would be using a throwaway account to contact them rather than an email that is explicitly tied to a particular user.

Not that I don't trust the mods to do this, but I didn't get a clear picture of how this worked from previous discussions.
posted by chiababe at 8:20 PM on February 2, 2010

Was I not clear that I understand that the mods can figure out who asked what? Was I not clear that I understood it even before this latest revelation? Was I not clear that I was, and am, OK with this?

Calm down, Eliza. Even if Jessamyn were to accidentally discover your secret superhero identity, I'm sure she'd keep it to herself.

That is your concern, yes? Accidentally arousing the mods' curiosity? You should relax. I doubt you have anything to fear.
posted by ryanrs at 11:37 PM on February 2, 2010

Look, I've outed myself to the mods a couple of times as an anonymous asker, to have them post an update. It's usually Jessamyn who responds, and she's never gone "OMG IndigoRain you're a freak!!" nor has it ever turned up anywhere else. I trust the mods. I probably have more trust for Jessamyn than some people I know IRL. (Her specifically because she's the mod I've talked to the most.)
posted by IndigoRain at 12:04 AM on February 3, 2010

I figure most people would be using a throwaway account to contact them

That would be ridiculously paranoid.
posted by ryanrs at 12:10 AM on February 3, 2010

That would be ridiculously paranoid.

Thus spake a man who has never found himself with an extraneous human body needing to be disposed of.
posted by Justinian at 4:29 AM on February 3, 2010 [2 favorites]

Jesus, ryanrs, having been patronizing and oversimplistic, and then having been shown to be definitively wrong in your patronizing, oversimplistic assumptions, your reaction is to try a different patronizing and oversimplistic course?

I give up.
posted by Flunkie at 5:36 AM on February 3, 2010

I sort of have a problem with people sharing accounts
posted by fuq at 6:04 AM on February 3, 2010

I sort of have a problem with people sharing accounts
Is it confession time? Do tell!
posted by Floydd at 8:59 AM on February 3, 2010

I sort of have a problem with people sharing accounts

Does that mean you are ambivalent about the practice in general, or that you "sort of " are experiencing account sharing firsthand and it is creating issues? If it's the former, aren't we all? If the latter, yes, do tell!
posted by Burhanistan at 9:01 AM on February 3, 2010

Some people may share accounts not because $5 USD is too much money, but that's it's just dang hard to get the money over the internet. I know people who have had issues with paypal (like it refusing to recognise a new credit card), and it can be awkward to send the $5 as a non-American. Certainly, I would have found it very difficult to do so before I was 21 -- that was the first time I had a credit card. And if you are a mostly lurker, but only occassionally want to comment, maybe using a spouse's or parent's account shouldn't be a big deal. My husband used my account before memberships opened again -- though he generally tried to preface his comments with something like "Mr jb here..."

Oh, and in those closed days, there was a quiet communal account for some monkeyfilter people. It was used discreetly for occasional comments, and has been abandoned now that we can have our own accounts. But metafilter was closed, and we didn't have any other options. That it was apparently not noticed (or at least, not complained about) shows that it wasn't a serious problem.
posted by jb at 11:23 AM on February 3, 2010

I actually do not know who asked the taters question. I specifically didn't go check.
posted by jessamyn at 5:40 PM on February 2 [+] [!]

This, right here, is all the evidence you need to trust jessamyn with the AnonyMe questions. She could find out who wrote the taters question! Any time she wants, she could look up the poster and contact them to say "Hey come on please tell us WTF are taters?!?" Some people would kill for that ability. Or is that just me? Some people would crumble under the temptation. But she's got the power to find the answer-- and the ethics and responsibility and self-control not to use it.

You see? Jessamyn is Frodo.
posted by EmilyClimbs at 5:56 PM on February 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

VOTE FOR FRODO
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:00 PM on February 3, 2010

Frodo talked a good game for a while, but in the end, he actually refused to destroy the ring, choosing to keep it for himself instead.
posted by Flunkie at 6:24 PM on February 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Jessamyn is Frodo

*fires up Photoshop*
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:41 PM on February 3, 2010

Jessamyn is Peppermint Patty.
posted by box at 7:22 PM on February 3, 2010

Which one is Frodo?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:46 PM on February 3, 2010

*facepalm*
posted by yhbc at 7:58 PM on February 3, 2010

Ah the google can help with this one....
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 8:00 PM on February 3, 2010

Metafilter: There's a greasemonkey script for that.
posted by FlyingMonkey at 9:23 AM on February 5, 2010