Life's too short to head back and forth through threads trying to put quote into context etc. Especially when there's no easy way of knowing which are the quotes and which are not - and when half the time references are being made to other unidentified threads of various sorts.

If people want to stick their name or pseudonym at the bottom of a post rather than a thread, that's not a big deal. At the top makes more sense, because then when you read it you can put it in context with the last post that person made, and it's easier to find it again, and to pick it out from other GUEST posts. But it's not a big deal.

The characters who screw things up are the ones who just come in as unadorned GUEST, without any kind of name or whatever, even a temporary one. And the reason that screw things up is that there's no way of sorting them out from each other. That buggers up the process of person-to-person communication. It also means people get blamed for things someone else has done, and then take umbrage, because they probably haven't even seen the offending posts that are being laid at their door.

And don't take all this so personally All - this is an issue that has come up time and time before.

Maybe this will illustrate what's been going on if you think people have over reacted. PG Wodehouse wrote a Jeeves story in which the plot hinges round an amateur concert. A number of people all get advised to turn up and sing the same song, unbeknownst to each other. A harmless enough song, Sonny Boy. The first one get's a good reception, the second less so - finally when the last one in the sequence turns up and sings it, he gets almost lynched. Which was the idea in the first place.

It's the same reason why a normally amiable enough person will sometimes erupt at having the same merry quip uttered to them for the twentieth time that day. The last straw.