Okay, I waited a while to reply because I wanted the thread to fill up with some ideas. The responses were mostly what I expected. Let me clear up some of my thoughts.

In the grand scheme of things, anonymous accounts do nothing positive for a community. I've been observing anonymous posting behavior from a moderator standpoint on Ax for 12 years now. DanUK asks me if an anonymous poster could have valuable insight or commentary. Sure, it's possible. But I still value someone's input more if I know they are putting forth their identity. Then I can assured that if there are any ulterior motives or biases, they will be more evident. Like i said before, what we know about a person changes how we interpret their comments.

Posting under an anonymous alias affects how people communicate. 9 times out of 10, when someone uses an anonymous account, they talk like an asshole. There are the exceptions where some people will talk like an asshole under their own identity. But I can at least appreciate that. That way, everyone knows that guy is an asshole.

I'm very opinionated on certain topics. I don't apologize for that. When I speak about something, you all know what I think and you can associate my opinions with my identity. If there is any flack that I take from that, then so be it. I'm not afraid of any negative interactions that may result from me stating my opinion. I just try to make sure I'm expressing my opinions clearly enough and try not to use personal insults. As the owner of Ax, I could very well get a negative result from stating my opinions...and I don't really care. The healthiest thing for any community is for everyone to see each other clearly.

The problem is that many of you are associating these problems with Ax when these are really problems with the UK community. Stevie Nisbet said, "Sorry brian , but ax has been hijacked and its pants compared to what it was 6-8 years ago." Ya know what also happened within the last 6-8 years? Ax has turned into a predominantly UK userbase. Gee, what a coincidence that is. There couldn't possibly be some sort of correlation between ...ah nevermind. Let's just blame Ax and go hide out on Facebook.

That's right, I said hide out on Facebook. Facebook has a lot of great features, but it is not even in the same ballpark as Ax or any other fight forum. Ax has 40,000 unique visitors per month (and growing) and almost 300,000 unique visitors per year. How many Facebook friends do you have? You can try to avoid your own community by interacting with select people on Facebook, but that is not a real solution. Ax exposes a lot of the issue within your community.

Over-sensitivity is one of the issues. Some people can't take criticism well. That's lame. But you know what is MORE lame? I would say 90% of anonymous posters on here are assholes. There are good ways and bad ways to write criticism. Anonymous users usually post with a very harsh tone, often making fun of a fighter. Stevie Nisbet wrote "quite frankly if I joined today it would be as an anonomous poster". I'll bet if Stevie did that, he would write posts with a different tone than he does today. Being anonymous gives people the right to expose the worst sides of their personality with no consequences. Professionalism goes out the window.

Anonymous posters provide a very small percentage of value to an online community. DanUK asks "Are anonymous people's views any less valid?" My answer is "hell yes". If you saw online communities from my perspective, you would know that is an obvious answer. When we interpret ideas, we take into consideration the person saying them. That is an important function of human communication. It makes even MORE sense in a community as competitive and political as the UK KB/MT community. It is important to know why someone is saying something.

People talk about bias on the Ax forum. There is some bias, but not as much as you think. I heavily respect fighters and fight professionals. They perform their jobs publicly and expose themselves to public scrutiny and criticism. They have very little incentive to sit around and hear negative criticism all day, especially if it is conveyed with a rude tone. It is a privilege that you get to interact with them directly on a forum like this. When they hear criticism from an anonymous account, they must instinctively think about who that person is and why they might be saying that. It makes perfect sense. It also makes sense that someone like that would have very little respect for someone posting anonymously, considering that they themselves are always in the public eye.

I could write a book about this topic. I have a ton of opinions about it (obviously). I just wanted to get the pulse of some Ax users about anonymous users. For many years, I've considered requiring validation for new Ax Accounts. Now that Facebook is popular, and 95% of Facebook accounts are people's true identities, people are getting conditioned to interacting with people under their real names. I like where this is headed.

If all of the anonymous accounts on Ax suddenly disappeared, would I care? Would I miss them? Over time, I would probably get more quality posters and I would probably still get the same number of visitors (if not more). In fact, I would probably see a spike in visitors in the beginning, since it's a controversial issue. I see very few downsides except for a handful of people complaining. That's nothing new. People complain anyway.