""When opinions or thoughts or feelings are expressed, again, in an open, public forum, there's no need to know who sent the message

Except that the exact same words can mean very different things in different mouths. What looks like a compliment can be a putdown, and the reverse. We can normally tell the difference easily enough, when we have a context to put it in - in the case of the Mudcat that means previous posts from someone with a "name" we can recognise. (Or for that matter, just a push of the button, and we can see the previous posts they have made, to give us that context.)

But a GUEST without a handle, and every post they make stands completely alone. And even to reply to them we are liable to have to go though the ridiculous procedure of copying out dates and times, and anyone wanting to know which post it is we are responding to, so as to be able to make sense of what we are saying, has to do the same...Imposing that on other people, without a very good reason, does not, to me, seem like courteous behaviour.

(Obviously no one cares a straw about the actual identity in the real world of anyone posting here who doesn't want to share that information - but that is a completely different thing. My analogy was an analogy.)