[Shog9]

This is an insightful observation, and a problem we struggled with for years on Stack Overflow: if you keep moderation quiet and anonymous, there's a lot less criticism, seemingly less hurt feelings... But also very little correction. The Star Chamber works great until corruption sets in; finding a good balance between secrecy and transparency is a challenge.

For years, moderators signed their names to messages like the one cited in the article. After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail... That particular bit of transparency was eliminated - the cost was too high for the limited benefit. OTOH, it used to be very difficult to find your own deleted posts but that has slowly gotten better (including visibility into who deleted them) - turns out the benefit there was substantial (identifying wrongly-deleted posts & curbing over-enthusiastic curators), while harassment has been mostly limited to occasional grousing.

[squigz]

> After one too many cases of a volunteer being called at work or having their family harassed or sent a suspicious package in the mail

This is why I'll never use my real name casually on the Internet, and why the idea of widespread identity verification on the Internet scares the crap out of me.