"Striving to better oft we mar what's well"

There are always good reasons for the kind of improvements that The Villan suggested there - but the effect, I'm pretty sure, would be to kill off much of the flexibility keeps the Mudcat alive, if annoying at times.

People who persist in coming in time and again in discussions as "nameless GUEST" strike me as annoying and confusing and I think it's a very discourteous thing to do.

However there doesn't really see any way to stop the practice that wouldn't have side effects which were worse. Most especially it might frighten off newcomers with questions to raise.

Incidentally I think it's a great mistake to refer to the "nameless Guests" just as GUESTS, because that inevitably gets understood as criticising people who come in as visitors or even longterm with a permanent or temporary handle attached to their GUEST.

Most of the time the "nameless GUESTS" are just irritating nuisances. Occasionally however they are people with interesting contributions to make. I sometimes wish that one of these would sometime explain why it is they insist on doing something that needlessly gets in the way, rather than, for example, using a temporary handle to distinguish their posts from other nameless GUEST posts, even in the same thread.