[dang]

Sorry for the offtopicness, but unless you're Reality Winner, can you please pick a different username? Using a well-known person's name falls into the category of trollish usernames, which we don't allow here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

If you reply with a different username you want, or email [e-mail], we'll be happy to rename your account.

[RealityWinner]

Hi there Dang, I've been using the name 'RealityWinner' since before the person Reality Winner came to light. I can verify that with my long standing github account with the same username.

[dang]

Hmm. But the HN account is only 17 days old.

The problem is that some people are going to react as if the name is trolling, whether it is or not (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Since the account is only a couple weeks old, I feel like we should just rename it to avoid woe. It's not the worst case, of course.

[RealityWinner]

Yes I understand I only made this recently. I've read for a while and wanted the ability to vote and comment so I made it. I updated my github[1] to prove ownership as well and put it in my about. If there are any issues brought up to me by other users about my name I would be open to renaming but at this time I would much prefer to use the username i've been using.

[1]https://github.com/RealityWinner

[dang]

Ok, we can leave it like this for now, but if people end up reacting in the way I described, we're going to end up enforcing the policy. I've learned that it's much better to deal with these things earlier than later, but this is a borderline case so we can kick the can down the road.

[RealityWinner]

Thanks, I understand. In the meantime can you point me to where the policy is? I don't see it in the Guidelines[1].

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[dang]

There are zillions of moderation practices like that one. They all appear repeatedly in my moderation comments, often with search links that point to past examples. But we don't make a formal list, for a bunch of reasons. One is that it would make the guidelines so long that no one would read them. Another is that we're not bureaucrats. A third is that if you make a list of everything, people will conclude that if something is not on the list, it must be ok, and that's not at all how HN works. It has always been a spirit-of-the-law, not a letter-of-the-law place.