mark/shadowban/block registered usernames

[cybershadow]

mark/shadowban/block registered usernames

[CyberShadow]

You can point out individual cases of abuse to Walter Bright (as he is the only person capable of deleting messages from the NNTP archive). However, a programmatic solution is impractical because spoofing poster names is possible not just from the forum, but also by email or NNTP. Registration is currently only used to store user settings on the server. Even if some kind of "authentic" post database or digital signature is introduced, you have issues with squatting, or a trivial bypass by using look-alike Unicode characters.

One thing that we could do is add an icon with alt text which identifies the poster's registered forum user name, and then forbid non-alphanumeric symbols in usernames. This would at least allow distiguishing the posts of two users identifying themselves as the same person. But then, the user name becomes part of the user's identity, so we'd need to add password recovery options, of which there currently are none.

All in all, at this point it is more practical to handle aliasing instances in a case-by-case basis.