A fundamental rule of human communication is: before starting to rant or abuse, make sure you understand what happened. Then criticize if necessary. Ranting is rarely useful, abuse never.

Choosing a nickname like "James Bond" facilitates communication without compromising anonymity. We can therefore assume that most who leave the field blank simply forgot (- happened to me a couple of times). Preventing it by technology would only have advantages, so I assume that Max finds himself unable to do it or finds it too much of an effort. (Actually I would welcome the possibility to protect my nickname with a password, rather than a cookie.)

Like the other posters above, I think that this problem is not the gravest one Mudcat faces.