Shakes wrote,

"When I read an internet forum, I'm only interested in the ideas presented. I read each post to see if it has any ideas I'm interested in, but usually without being aware of who made the post. If I post, I think of it as just adding another idea to the discussion. I don't see why it matters whose idea it is. Can anyone explain that?

"I also believe that internet forums would be more productive if everyone took the same approach. I think the need to protect the virtual ego of a user ID leads to a lot of ridiculous bickering. The same would be true with real-world identities and egos, except that in the real world I think people are more careful about what they say and don't as often get into a position of needing to defend an ego. Just as some very polite and considerate people turn into homicidal maniacs when they get behind the wheel of a car, it seems to me that many people who would not reply to an opinion expressed in a normal conversation with an ad hominem attack or insult directed against the speaker will nevertheless respond in exactly that way on an internet forum. And I suspect that many forum users react viscerally to each new user ID that appears on the forum in the same way that the males in a wolf pack or chimpanzee community react to a new lone male that appears near their circle, i.e. as another potential challenge to their authority."

Shakes, I think you're missing something about this particular internet forum. Among the people who have been here a few years, and that's a lot of people, there is a real sense of community, of knowing each other as individuals. You can see it in the obit threads for Catspaw (Pat Patterson), for Art Thieme, for Jean Ritchie (kytrad), for a few others. Sure, one evaluates the ideas on their own merits, but one also associates them with the people who posted them, and one builds up a picture of the poster, and it adds something intangible but very powerful to the discussion, to the interaction. It's not just ideas, either. It's jokes and stories, it's tales of woe and tales of triumph, it's feelings and emotions.

This is actually true of most of the internet fora I've participated in. Maybe you're just not going to the right sectors of the internet. Or maybe community is not what you're looking for. But community is what Mudcat has, and it's why Mudcatters would like to be able to associate a unique identifier to each poster.

Does that answer your questions?